Creating immersive nature-inspired experiences with Joel Zika

In this interview Joel Zika talks about the creative process behind “Valley of a Thousand Plants”. “Valley of a Thousand Plants" is an immersive installation that surrounds audiences with hyper-real animated plant forms that react to visitors' proximity. The installation is hosted at the Cube at the Multi-Arts Pavilion in Lake Macquarie, NSW, a 360-degree immersive digital projection space.

Joel Zika is a multimedia artist and educator currently teaching at Kent State University. He has a background in VR projects, documentaries, interactive animations, and public installations. During the interview Joel briefly discusses his PhD research on dark rides in amusement parks, exploring how the history of indoor ride design can inform contemporary media production.   

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

• The significance of Joel's research on amusement parks and how it shapes his artistic practice.
• The technical setup and challenges of creating a large-scale immersive installation.
• The role of collaboration in expanding creative projects and reaching new audiences.

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Highlights

(6:01) The social dynamics of amusement parks and digital experiences

(8:55) Interactive art installations with sensor-activated plant animations

(19:28) Creating interactive spaces with simple tech

(29:08) Collaborative creativity

About Joel Zika

Dr. Joel Zika is an immersive media expert with a Ph.D. from Swinburne University in Melbourne  He is currently teaching at Kent State University, where he continues to inspire the next generation of media artists. With over 15 years of experience, his work spans virtual reality films, documentaries, and public installations, showcased globally at venues like the Moss Arts Center and Dark Mofo. An educator at institutions such as Deakin and RMIT Universities, Zika also speaks at global events like South By Southwest. A key aspect of his research is the application of game engines for the location-based entertainment sector and virtual production.    

Key takeaways from Creating immersive nature-inspired experiences with Joel Zika

1. "Valley of a Thousand Plants" by Joel Zika is an immersive installation where animated plant forms react to visitors' movements, creating a dynamic and engaging environment. Hosted at the Cube in Lake Macquarie, NSW, the installation utilises 360-degree projection to fully surround audiences with vibrant, larger-than-life plant imagery.
   

2. Joel draws inspiration from his PhD research on dark rides in amusement parks, using insights from these immersive entertainment spaces to inform his approach to media art installations. He emphasises the importance of creating spaces that evoke wonder and engagement, much like the rides he studies.
   

3. The technical setup for "Valley of a Thousand Plants" involves the use of ultrasonic sensors and Resolume and TouchDesigner, with pre-rendered material. 
   

4. Prototyping and real-time adjustments in the actual installation space were crucial for achieving the desired visual and interactive experiences Joel explains how he tested components off-site but needed to fine-tune the setup in the Cube to ensure the plants reacted appropriately to visitors.
   

5. Collaboration now plays a significant role in Joel's creative process. He discusses working with arts producer James Voller from Collide Public Art, highlighting how their partnership brings different stories and perspectives to their projects.

Links from the podcast with Joel Zika  

• Learn more about the Valley of a 1000 plants
• Visit the  Multi-Arts Pavilion, mima website 
• Learn more about Collide Public Art
• Visit the Joel Zika website 
• Follow Joel Zika on Instagram

Transcript: Introduction: experiencing Valley of a Thousand Plants

Robin Petterd: What’s it like to experience Valley of a Thousand Plants?

Joel Zika: I didn’t know what it would feel like until I arrived in the space a couple of weeks before installation. When it opened, and people were inside with me, it felt a bit like being inside a version of Fantasia—but filled with flora. You recognise the shapes and forms: microscopic plants, bulbs, flowering stages. They move strangely—sometimes aggressively, sometimes seductively—and they shift in scale and colour around you.

There’s something odd about it, but it’s still familiar. You float through a space of dancing plant forms. And there’s something distinctly Australian about the shapes—because that’s what they’re based on. Experiencing it for the first time, it feels playful, psychedelic, and deeply immersive. You’re disoriented—in a good way. You lose track of up and down, left and right. It feels endless.

Designing immersive spaces with 360-degree projection

Robin Petterd: So in this immersive projection space, you’ve created a floating world that doesn’t follow traditional perspective. It offers a different way of seeing.

Joel Zika: Right. I visited the previous curated work in the space. For those unfamiliar, it’s 360 degrees of screen. But more than that, it’s a curated experience. You need to put effort into creating a solo exhibit that captures people’s attention—something they can journey through and immerse themselves in.

The last work I saw was a beautiful animation. It was flat, in a deliberate way—like a storybook. Characters moved across the screen, and behind and in front of you. But I work in 3D graphics, which means I can create forms with real physicality. You can lose that depth if you're not careful. So I chose to leave a lot of black in the space and avoided over-illuminating it. I wanted it to feel... spacey. When I was applying, I kept saying I wanted it to feel like a spaceship. I’m not sure it does, but it definitely feels like looking into a night sky.

Robin Petterd: One of your VR pieces comes to mind. How was this 360 experience different to working in a headset-based immersive format?

Joel Zika: It’s incredibly rewarding. My doctoral research focused on immersive spaces, especially those from old fairgrounds—rides, spooky attractions, things like that. It’s not about dark themes—it’s about the environments those attractions created. Fully indoor, 360-degree sensory experiences.

When you work digitally, you’re always trying to break out of the flatness of the computer screen. My doctoral work involved documenting immersive physical environments, but people mostly saw them through headsets. I learned a lot from studying those amusements—lights emerging from nowhere, no visible architecture, no walls or corners to orient you.

This installation offered a chance to work in a truly 360 space, and it was perfect. It’s also incredibly bright. High-quality projections like these let you create intense darkness too, because you’re not just blasting light from every angle. Some of these giant plants fall away into blackness—and that contrast is striking.

You can share the work in the space. Kids especially respond to it from their own physical perspective—being small and looking up at these massive forms. You can see them looking at it, and that adds another layer.

Joel Zika: One of the big takeaways from my research into amusements is that shared experience is powerful. We enjoy seeing other people engage, react, get surprised. That feedback loop is really important. Digital work can be lonely—you don’t always get that instant, real-time response from viewers.

Robin Petterd: That brings up something I’ve been thinking about—a kind of taxonomy of installation spaces. Whether something is a solo experience, a communal one, or a collaborative one. What you’re describing feels social—people watching each other, sharing the experience.

Joel Zika: Exactly. Amusement rides are inherently social. It’s not just about what you feel, but what others around you feel—who’s screaming, who’s laughing.

Joel Zika: I once had a conversation with Mike Monello, producer of The Blair Witch Project [https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0598201/]. He talked about Coney Island and how those rides changed how people experienced media. You’d tumble around, fall over—and that vulnerability was public. It was working-class entertainment, and it was social. He drew parallels to YouTube—how we like seeing people react to things.

That idea really stuck with me. I saw it in the gallery—kids running up to the work, activating it, their parents watching. Each person saw it from a different perspective. That range of experience is powerful.

Building interaction with ultrasonic sensors

Robin Petterd: That word, “activation.” What kind of interaction was involved?

Joel Zika: We used a series of ultrasonic distance sensors—simple but effective. There were six of them, discreetly placed around the room. They detect proximity—so when someone walks toward a section of the screen, it sends a signal. The plants on that part of the screen respond and grow.

The scaling is dramatic. The plants are wriggling, almost dancing. As you move closer, they grow, sometimes in a way that feels ominous. For kids, it was like being chased by plants. They could see the effect immediately and kept running from spot to spot to see what would happen next.

Animating plant forms: creative and conceptual drivers

Robin Petterd: A number of your recent pieces use plant-like forms. What’s driving that interest?

Joel Zika: Some of it comes from the commissions themselves. I’ve worked closely with James Voller from Collide Public Art, a producer I often collaborate with. We worked on a project for Botanica, a public art festival in Brisbane’s botanical gardens. Our approach is to use the work to expose some unseen or forgotten visual history of a space.

In that Botanica project, we brought back to life a plant species that no longer existed in the area. It was about revealing something that’s there, but hidden or lost. So the plant theme started with the context, but I also found it creatively compelling. In this current piece, Valley of a Thousand Plants, the title comes from a scientific paper by two local botanists. The area has extraordinary plant biodiversity, and I wanted to evoke that—without making it a literal botany lesson.

Joel Zika: I’m drawn to plants because they allow for fantasy. My background is in 3D graphics, and early on I was making things just because they looked cool—shiny, dynamic, animated. But over time, you want more than that. You start looking for ways to merge fantasy with reality. Plants let me do that. They’re abstract and recognisable at the same time.

The piece I did for Botanica—called Musa—was centred on a banana plant. It was trapped in a case, almost trying to escape. The work spoke to colonial histories of plant migration—how flora was moved and forgotten. Musa and Valley of a Thousand Plants both play with this idea: taking plants and giving them a sense of life and agency. Colourful, exaggerated, a bit alien. What would it look like to peer into a petri dish and see a whole world growing and responding to you?

From fantasy to real-time response: process and prototyping

Robin Petterd: So in both cases, you’re responding to specific spaces. One outdoors and public, the other indoors and controllable. You’ve hinted at it a bit, but what was the process for building Valley of a Thousand Plants?

Joel Zika: The project was commissioned by Lake Macquarie City Council and shown at the Lake Macquarie Museum of Art and Culture. They have this immersive 360-degree cube space, used for live music, theatre, and now digital installations. It’s well-designed—high-resolution projection, great infrastructure.

Martina Mogravious, who’s been key in setting it up, has a background in holography and contemporary art. She understands immersive media. So I wanted to show how this space could be used in ways that were technically simple but visually expansive.

I used a workflow built around layering. Each plant was modelled in detail, animated, and exported as video. I created seven or eight distinct plants, each with different textures—gold leaf, neon, plastic-like. Some were meant to feel close, others distant. That layering gave the illusion of depth and immersion.

Joel Zika: Once I got on-site, I “planted” the plants around the room. Some were right up close, others blurry and further back—like being in a garden of surreal tulips. Even though they were 2D videos, the bold lighting and dark space gave them a 3D quality.

We connected the six sensor zones to these visual layers using TouchDesigner. The sensors fed distance data—closer meant bigger plants. And it was smooth. Nothing fancy like LIDAR or machine learning. Just ultrasonic sensors, the same ones people use for parking sensors or grain tanks. It’s practical and works well for this kind of interaction.

Making immersion simple: tools, layers, and TouchDesigner

Robin Petterd: So even though the interaction was simple—just scaling in response to distance—it created a very direct, engaging experience. You mentioned being able to prototype some of this at your workplace. Were you able to get a clear sense of how it would translate to the 360 space before installing it?

Joel Zika: Yes, to a degree... (continues)

Joel Zika: Yes, to a degree. At Kent State University in Ohio, where I work, we have a large widescreen setup—not as immersive, but technically similar. I used Resolume to layer and preview the animations. If you’ve used Photoshop or Premiere, it’s a similar idea—stacking layers, applying effects. So I built a kind of simulation, wrapping the content to see how it might look.

But I couldn’t render the whole thing in advance. You have to trust that your components will work when placed together in the space. That was a bit stressful. And then Hawaiian Airlines lost my luggage, which had all the sensors. So I had to rebuild them on site.

Luckily, everything was modular—sensors, videos, software. Once you’ve got the videos and know how to place them, the rest comes together. I knew the visual logic—foreground and background forms, shifting depth—but the real test was how the sensors would respond in the actual space. I’d tested them in my office and down the hallway, but this was the full-scale challenge.

Joel Zika: And yes, it’s pre-rendered video, not real-time 3D. Some people assumed it was being generated live. I do work with Unreal Engine and I’m moving more in that direction, but for this piece, the simplicity worked. It gave the illusion of being alive without needing the full computational load.

What excites me is how lifelike these forms feel. They reach toward you, respond to you. It’s poetic. You don’t have to wave your arms or perform. The object—this sculptural digital plant—reacts to your presence in a quiet, direct way. That’s something I want to explore more: giving digital forms a kind of agency or sensitivity.

Joel Zika: This approach also makes the work more accessible. You don’t need to be an expert coder. You could use photos, videos, portraits—drop them into this same setup. I do a lot of masterclasses, and I can imagine artists using this platform to explore totally different content—birds, people, brushstrokes. The system is flexible.

What I learned: collaboration, scale, and sharing spaces

Robin Petterd: What did you learn from making this piece?

Joel Zika: The main takeaway was that you don’t need a lot of data to make something immersive and engaging. The gallery wanted something that would connect with both kids and adults. And I had a hunch that a simple interactive layer—just enough to trigger a sense of play—would be enough. It was.

Joel Zika: Another big lesson was scale. I don’t experiment with it enough. I’d previewed the work, but when we were actually in the space, those giant pink flowers looked enormous—devouring, almost. That’s something you can’t fully grasp until it’s installed. The size changes everything.

I’ve also learned this from other works—like when projecting onto water. Each surface responds differently. You have to test, iterate, observe. One of my students recently wanted to project onto leather, and I told them: you’ve got to go try it. Don’t assume.

Joel Zika: Another realisation: you don’t need scenes or landscapes in projection work. You just need physical forms—shapes that hold up in the space. These plant forms, whether alien or microscopic, are immediately recognisable. That’s what gives them presence.

Robin Petterd: At one point, you described the visuals as sculptures—floating in space. That felt very true in the documentation. It sounds like the piece wasn’t really finished until it was installed.

Joel Zika: Exactly. I hadn’t tested the sensors, visuals, and software all together until I was there. But once it came together, it felt right. That sense of being swallowed up—that was something I didn’t fully anticipate, but it became central to the work.

Robin Petterd: Final question: what’s your greatest piece of advice to other artists working with immersive technology?

Joel Zika: If you don’t yet have access to big spaces, find them. Beg to use a screen somewhere, anything with scale. Like a musician, you need somewhere to test and hear your work at volume—just for yourself.

And collaborate. Working with James Voller has been career-changing for me. We bounce ideas, build things together, and push each other. When you’re stuck or unsure, that shared investment is invaluable. We once projected into water for a piece—he held the hose, I projected, we yelled at each other, got soaked. But it worked. And we both had stories to share. That’s how your work finds more homes—through shared experiences, experimentation, and persistence.