Lumos

Ekimini Nkanta & Mamadou Diallo

Lumos is an immersive art installation that transforms an open courtyard into an interactive forest floor. As visitors walk across, a neon ecosystem comes to life at their feet: leaves scatter, crystallized flowers bloom, and glowing mushrooms light the way. The experience is driven by projection mapping, an Xbox Kinect, and real-time graphics in the Unity game engine.

About the artist: Ekemini Nkanta is a creative technologist from NYC making immersive experiences with light, sensors & code. Inspired by fantasy illustrations and hidden gems in nature, she brings playful, surreal concepts to life that invite audiences to move, touch and explore to their heart's content. Her work is actively expanding into projection mapping, interactive installations, and augmented reality experiments. She holds a Bachelors in Emerging Media Technology from CUNY NYC College of Technology, and exhibited her work for the first time in Illumination 2023.

About the artist: Mamadou Diallo is a game developer from NYC whose simple joys in life come from taking pieces of his mind and bringing them to reality. From writing to drawing to programming (and everything in between), he finds a way to dabble in it. His most recent areas of focus have been in Virtual Reality on the Meta Quest and Physical Computing projects with Arduino.