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Description:

For this project, we are targeting the negative impact of human activities on marine ecosystems, especially those that cause the deaths of aquatic life. We trained a model using the teachable machine website to train a model to recognize our different poses: staying still, moving arms, and not in the camera. The different states of the user's body movements reflect the different levels of human impacts on the aquatic habitat.

In a Max patch, we create a particle system effect to represent the movement of ocean waves. When the users are not in the camera and when the users are staying still, the wave particles will appear to be white on a deep blue b background, along with the peaceful and natural sound of ocean waves, indicating a harmonic co-existence between humans and nature. The velocity of the particle movement will be affected by the audio files. When the users’ movements are detected, the ocean waves will turn from white to red, which indicates blood or injuries of the ocean creatures along with the “psycho“ audio that would make the audience uncomfortable.

Through our project, we want to explore the significant impact of human activities on the marine environment and its creatures, calling for people’s awareness of their behaviors and to live in a harmonic relationship with nature.