The evolution of Lacunae with Soma Lumia

In this podcast, you will learn how Lacunae, an interactive installation by Tasmanian artist collective Soma Lumia, has evolved through multiple iterations. Lacunae is an interactive installation that enables people to dance with others in different locations through projected silhouettes and sound.

In this conversation, Darryl Rogers and Troy Merritt from Soma Lumia share the journey of Lacunae. The project was born during COVID-19 to rethink how technology shapes human connection. It was originally designed for the Mona Foma festival as events began to re-open after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Since then, it has evolved, layering live and recorded interactions—where dancers move not just across space, but across time. Lacunae has become an ongoing experiment for Soma Lumia.  

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

• The iterative process behind Lacunae and why each version is a new creative experiment.
• The role of collaboration in how Soma Lumia works.
• The transition from Kinect sensors to webcams and how this offered different creative possibilities.

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Chapters

• (00:00:00) Introduction and acknowledgements

• (00:01:32) Meet the artists: Darryl and Troy
• (00:02:56) Exploring the concept of Lacunae
• (00:04:01) Development and evolution of Lacunae
• (00:09:12) Audience interaction and feedback
• (00:10:33) Technical challenges and solutions
• (00:18:11) Collaborative process and team dynamics
• (00:21:24) Reflections and advice for artists
• (00:25:59) Conclusion and final thoughts

About Soma Lumia

Soma Lumia is a tech-art collective based in Launceston, Tasmania, founded in 2015. Their work explores the boundary between physical and digital, movement and technology, real and virtual. The collective has presented projects at Illuminate Adelaide, Botanica, Beaker Street, the South Australia Museum, the University of Houston, and Mona Foma.

Their practice is deeply rooted in experimentation and collaboration, bringing in new voices—technologists, dancers, musicians, and designers—to expand each project’s scope. Lacunae is a prime example of how their work evolves over time, rather than existing as a single fixed installation. The core members are Darryl Rogers, James Riggall, and Troy Merritt.

• Darryl Rogers is a media artist working with video, installation, and immersive platforms to explore perception and spatial transformation.
• Troy Merritt is a creative technologist with over two decades of experience in media systems, interactivity, and augmented environments.
• James Riggall is an entrepreneur and educator working at the intersection of immersive technology, storytelling, and digital experience design.

Key takeaways from this interview with Darryl Rogers and Troy Merritt from Soma Lumia

"It’s essentially an interactive, multi-site installation where people can dance with others in different locations in an almost uninhibited way." – Darryl Rogers

 Lacunae creates shared experiences where participants dance together across multiple locations, interacting through video projections and sound. Each iteration of the work expands on this idea, exploring new ways to connect people through technology.

Audience response

"One of the fun things about Lacunae is that audiences take different things away from it. Some don’t even realise they’re interacting with someone else until afterward." – Troy Merritt

Some participants immediately engage in the interactive movement, while others are more hesitant. The work creates moments of surprise and discovery, with visitors sometimes realising they’ve been dancing with a past participant through a recorded "ghost" dancer.

Collaboration and artistic growth

"Collaboration is in the DNA of Soma Lumia. The work isn’t just ours; it’s shaped by the people we bring in—technologists, dancers, musicians, and more." – Troy Merritt

Soma Lumia’s projects evolve through collaboration, incorporating expertise from a variety of disciplines. Each version of Lacunae has been shaped by new creative input, expanding the scope and interactivity of the work.

The ongoing evolution

"The work continues to evolve because there’s new ways to explore it… Every time we do it, it morphs into something new." – Darryl Rogers

Lacunae reflects an iterative approach to digital art. Each presentation is a new opportunity to adapt and experiment, shaped by the site, collaborators, and technology. Rather than arriving at a finished state, the work remains open and continually responsive.

Advice

"Be open and willing to explore and trust each other with what you’re trying to do." – Darryl Rogers

 "Technology is both a tool and a challenge. Always ask—what is it actually adding? How can you refine it to create something more human?" – Troy Merritt

Soma Lumia emphasises the importance of trust and collaboration when working in a team. Having a strong, open group dynamic enables creative risk-taking and shared problem-solving. At the same time, they encourage artists working with technology to remain intentional—focusing not on complexity for its own sake, but on using technology to enhance the human experience of a work.

Links from this podcast

• Learn more about Lacunae on Soma Lumia’s website
• Learn more about Mona Foma
• Follow Soma Lumia on Instagram

Edited transcript of this interview with Soma Lumia

What Lacunae feels like as an experience

Robin Petterd: What’s it like to experience—listen to me jinx myself by saying I was gonna have trouble pronouncing, didn’t I? What’s it like to experience Luz title?

Daryl: You go, well, okay, so it’s called Lacunae, is the work. And what’s it like to experience it? It’s essentially the work is an interactive, multi-site installation where people can dance with other people in other spaces in a sort of almost uninhibited way, whilst they see their image as a sort of a video signal on the screen with a video background, and it’s always with a really interesting soundtrack behind it.

So it’s a sort of an experience of dancing with other people, dancing in a space where you’re actually manipulating a video image on a screen, and vibing out to a soundtrack. So I don’t know—it’s a bit of fun, I think.

Troy: It’s like stepping into a portal where there’s a somewhat psychedelic video art experience happening in front of you, but you’re actually in that, and then you’re transported to other locations, and you’re actually interacting with the people at those sites as well.

Where the project came from

Robin Petterd: So where did the idea title come from?

Troy: Yeah. So the work—it really, it was something that was quite interesting in its development. It was something that we started developing with the team at MONA FOMA  as a response to the COVID pandemic.

So at the time, they were very unsure as to what the status of the festival was going to be leading into 2021. Everyone was—we were still in lockdown in Tasmania at that point in time—and they started to just look for collaborators who they’d worked with before that could create something that could be put on under a whole range of different conditions.

So we were asked to sort of brainstorm some works, and it was very much work that we developed on Zoom calls. So we did all the creative thought about what we could do that could potentially have a big audience or a small audience, or an audience that was all in the same spot, or all in different spots.

So we did a lot of conceptual work, and we did this all on Zoom, and we got fairly sick of doing Zoom calls in that period—it seemed like we were living our lives on there.

And an idea that’s always been quite interesting is the idea that we use technology as a way to mediate our communications. It allows us to communicate with people, but it also takes away things from communication as well. And Lacunae was an opportunity to explore what some of that was, and it ended up evolving into something that enabled people to dance—which was something that we hadn’t seen a lot of in Zoom calls before.

And at the time, I believe it was against the law to dance with other people in a venue. So it was a way to enable that to happen—even though people were in three separate rooms dancing at the same time, you were all sort of in the same space and dancing together—

Daryl: Actually three different spaces across Launceston. So it was really an interesting approach to, you know, an art exhibit that actually found its place in three very non-gallery type environments. Also where you’re in a black space by yourself, but creating art. So it’s—yeah, bit of a cool idea.

Iteration as method: evolving across versions

Robin Petterd: One thing that’s sort of different is you stayed with this idea—there are now three different versions of it. How’s each version been different?

Troy: Yeah, it’s certainly a work that’s evolved over time. The very first iteration of it—we were under a few constraints to make it, and we learned a lot in making that first version. The first version we were really proud of, and we felt it went off really well.

And one of the interesting things that we did as we evolved this into the second iteration, which we took to the Illuminate Adelaide festival over in South Australia, was: the first version was all about people being spatially disconnected. You’re in three different locations.

And what we’ve added to the work since then is actually the idea of temporal dislocation as well. So you’re not only dancing with people in different physical locations—located in space—but you’re also dancing with what we call ghosts, which are recordings of people that have experienced the work before, and you’re actually interacting with them as well. So you’re interacting with people not just at a spatial distance, but also a temporal distance as well.

Daryl: There’s also a development. You know, when you create a work like this, you don’t know what you’re going to end up with. So the first work—whilst we were very proud of it—there were still so many ideas that we wanted to explore.

So when we got the opportunity to do a few more versions, it’s given us an opportunity to explore both the work from an aesthetic point of view, but also from a technological point of view, so that it’s more or less coming into its own, even now.

And I think there’s actually been four exhibits of the work. So, yeah, it’s developing, and it just gets better every time, I think.

Robin Petterd: That temporal thing is really interesting. Because one of the problems with these types of telepresence pieces is the fact that you might not have someone at the other end all the time, and the temporal shifting does a really nice thing. It solves that problem.

But at the same time, this is just like another really playful side of that as well—that you’re not quite sure when your recording is going to show up and how other people are going to react to that. So it’s not this… you’re definitely shaping the future of it, rather than the moment you’re in as well.

Troy: Yeah, and it’s been a fun one for us to explore exactly what the ghosts are in it.

The third iteration of the work, which was called Lacunae flow—we actually brought Stompin Youth Dance Company in, and all of the ghosts were choreographed pieces by the Stompers. So you were getting to dance with a youth dance company in that particular version of the work.

In the most recent version of the work, there was a ghost recording of Dave mangenner Gough, who is dancing in that work as well.

So it’s been really interesting to play around with what some of that temporal shift is in terms of who the ghosts are, and it’s been a fun thing to explore.

Prototyping a multi-site installation

Robin Petterd: What sort of audience feedback have you got on that template?

Troy: I think one of the fun things about this work, for me, is that audiences seem to take different things away from it, and sometimes the audience don’t quite know what to make with it or quite what they’re interacting with.

We had a really memorable interaction in one iteration where it was the artistic director of a dance company had been a part of the work, and asked us: does the person at the other end know that they were dancing with me? And the answer is no—and that was a shattering blow to their ego. But it was really fun for the idea that you don’t actually know who that person at the other end of the work is.

There’s another great story I can tell about the very first iteration, where—because all three sites were in Launceston—I ran around, literally running between the three sites, to set each work up that morning. And by the time I got to the third site, I could see a small child dancing in one of the sites.

And I started dancing with them because the work had just ticked over. It was open. And so I started dancing and moving about, and we were interacting.

And I jumped out to let the first person in the queue in, and I ran back to the other site, and out walked my then six-year-old son. And I had no idea that my son was the person in there dancing. And it was a really special moment to make that connection—that we had no idea that we’d be dancing with one another.

Robin Petterd: Running around is partly a nice way to go into another question, which is actually: how did you prototype it?

Daryl: Put it all in one room?

Troy: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Particularly that first development—so much of the first development was: we had the idea of, we’d like to do this, this dancing across sites, but will it actually work?

And it was pretty much: let’s get three computers, and we were using Microsoft Kinect sensors for the first version, and we got three projectors, and we likely had access to a reasonably large room that we could do some prototyping in.

So we pretty much had that set up in three corners of the room, and we quickly ran into issues about where you could stand and where you couldn’t, and getting overlaps from different Kinects and everything. But we managed to get that all prototyped and got to explore some ideas, which was really nice.

You can sort of do that when everything’s in the same space. That’s much harder to do when they’re at a distance.

Robin Petterd: What was the thing you did when you were leading up to the prototype in terms of process?

Daryl: Well, in essence, we were trying to work on: well, what is this? What is this background? What is the video?

So the work became a site-responsive work. Each of the sites in the original version—the video was a response to the site it was in. So we were in a shop—an empty shop in the middle of Launceston. We were in the foyer of a theatre in another part, and then we were in a church hall.

So we went around and shot video that somehow had some responsiveness to those sites.

And the composerIan Chia also came in and worked with us on what the soundtrack for each individual site was, and did an amazing interpretation of each site in terms of what that soundtrack was about. He had voices reciting Shakespeare and Australian plays in the theatre. He had organ music playing in the church hall. And I can’t remember what was in the shop.

So yeah—that was sort of our way into the work, where we were just trying to bounce off: what were these places?

And then we had the figures to think about—what were the figures going to look like? And aesthetically, I guess we were trying to come up—well, I guess I was thinking that through—going: we don’t want these to be just these ordinary outlines of people. We want them to have some sort of dynamism to them.

So we, with Rhiannon Ross, our tech whiz, created these lovely painterly figures that used sort of an animated painting background to the figures. So, yeah—that was sort of our aesthetic approach to it. Troy can talk a little bit about the technological approach to it, I don’t know.

Troy: Yeah, it’s—Darryl was developing the aesthetic of this work while we were just trying to figure out: can we technically make this work? What sort of delays are we going to have between sites, and what the best way to shift the data around is going to be?

In that very first iteration—and pretty much every iteration since—because this is an internet-connected work, and you’re dealing with three different internet connections, it’s always a question of: how do we manage that and make sure things are as stable as they can be, and try to eliminate any potential for technical faults there.

But we were really developing and learning, I think, through playing with it—just actually what those interactions could be, and how figurative did we want the people to look in this.

Darryl talked about what that aesthetic was, but it was also just how that felt, and we played around with that quite a bit in terms of how the bodies were tracked, to try to come up with that. And that’s something that’s evolved through the different versions as we’ve explored different ways of doing that as well.

Tools and technology: from Kinect and Unity to webcams and TouchDesigner

Robin Petterd: I didn’t actually pick up that site-specific nature of the background images in the documentation, yeah, which is sort of surprised a little bit, but I didn’t pick that up. Actually, might go back and even sit there and go, what? Why did I miss that?

Because also, one of the things I was wondering about whether or not you thought about taking this sort of outside of a more public space where people are not so much entering it that maybe you’re encountering it by accident.

Troy: Yeah, it’s something that we’ve discussed, and one of the original ideas we had was actually having something in a shop window that people didn’t know what they were interacting with. And there were just a few technical challenges around the particular cameras we were using and getting good quality images for that to work.

It is a work that we’ve done for festivals, and we’ve done it as part of a gallery show with the two museum sites in Launceston. And we think that it has potential in both of those modes as well. Festivals—obviously—you can be a lot more flexible with the types of spaces, and you can invite in a non-artistic or art-seeking audience into those spaces, whereas a gallery is a little bit different in that sort of a context.

Robin Petterd: You said that as it was in the first version used Kinects. So how has the technology evolved in terms of the sensing as well as the rendering?

Troy: Yeah, it’s been a journey in terms of the technical and how we’re doing this.

Essentially, the first three iterations all used the Microsoft Kinect, which is—for its time—an amazing piece of hardware, but unfortunately it is a product of its time. The sensors—even the second-generation sensors—were discontinued almost 15 years ago now. And in terms of reliability, in terms of modern operating system support, they’re getting very hard to maintain those sensors.

So for the latest iteration, we have replatformed how we’ve done everything. So it is now being—it’s just using webcams, which gives us a lot more functionality.

And it’s quite surprising, since we originally developed that work, how far webcams have come. It’s really, I think, a boom driven by the pandemic and by podcasts and content creation, and everyone has a better quality webcam now that we can do quite a bit with just a basic webcam.

Daryl: And we’re driving with new software as well. So, you know, the software is, to some degree, I think it’s opened up a whole lot of new avenues of what the work could be.

Robin Petterd: Okay, so at the beginning, what software were you using compared to now?

Troy: So it was originally developed—Rhiannon Ross was the creative technologist that worked with us on the initial creation of the work. And it was essentially a custom Unity application. So it was using a game engine.

And we have since migrated to using TouchDesigner to create the work, working with another creative technologist named Matt Daniels.

Robin Petterd: Just chatting back to the Kinects, by the way—even the second one that keeps on overheating was me. For me, it’s one of those moments where things just end up not working anymore. So actually being in a very similar spot to sit there and go, do I actually need depth? Can I do this with… yeah, with a webcam?

And it’s been really freeing, because it’s made things a lot simpler by not having my life—yeah.

Troy: I still think it was a fantastic piece of technology and very capable. And I wish that there’d been a third version of the Kinect, but it’s a product that there just doesn’t seem to be the development left in.

You can do so much now with a webcam and pose tracking and those types of things, but the sensors that are still out there—if you can find one that is still working, that isn’t overheating—then there’s compatibility with USB drivers and all sorts of problems that we’ve found in the last couple of iterations, which made that choice to replatform pretty straightforward for us.

Collaboration as part of the Soma Lumia DNA

Robin Petterd: You talked about some of the collaborators you’ve worked with now and in the past. Similarly, as a collective—and that’s the word that you use—how does that sort of collaborative process work?

Troy: It works to varying degrees of success, I think we’d say, wouldn’t we? Darryl?

Daryl: It feels like we’ve always come out okay. But, you know, there are moments where you wonder whether you’ve got the right people on board. But all of our collaborations have been a joyful thing, I think.

And certainly, we seem to be driven by that idea that Soma Lumia is three people: Troy and myself and James Riggall. But even from the very first iteration of the very first work that we made, way back in 2015—Troy, or 16 at Sawtooth —we had a number of people who also were there with us, helping to create that work.

And it seems to be an ethos, or a thing, where we’re just always happy to find or work alongside other people who can bring something to the project.

And that collaboration has been technologists like Rhiannon and Matt, to people like Jim Moginie from Midnight Oil, to other wonderful composers, and sculptors and all sorts of things. So, yeah, it’s a really interesting path to go down, and I really get a lot out of it.

Troy: Yeah, I think it’s something we talk about quite a bit—that we feel like collaboration is a part of the Soma Lumia DNA.

We think that every project that we work on—it’s not just that the work is greater than the sum of the parts in terms of the collaborators there—it’s that we strongly believe that these are works that we create that would never come out the same way if we had different people in the mix.

So even when we are working with creative technologists who are working on the technical aspects of a work, they are bringing their creative energy into this as well, and they are going to evolve the work in a different way. It might be that they have ideas in the mix that we’re exploring.

And a lot of the collaborations that we do are with people that don’t work with technology as much, and we’re always on a journey to explore what technology actually means in a work and what it’s enabling, and also what it’s taking away as well.

So that’s why we’ve worked with dancers, we’ve worked with jewellery makers, we’ve worked with musicians, we’ve worked with lighting designers, we’ve worked with lots of different people across lots of different disciplines, because it’s ultimately down to how we can best use technology to tell the story or create the work, ask the questions that we’re looking—

Daryl: To—as both a service, but also as a medium. You know, technology because—and this is, I think, the really interesting thing—is: how does technology become a medium unto itself? And I think Lacunae is one of the shining examples of that process.

Robin Petterd: To also pick up on one word that you used, Daryl. It was “fine”. It was sort of like: maybe it was fine, wasn’t fine. But it sort of felt like you’ve got this core, and then other people come along—sometimes they find you rather than the core finding them—to realise things as well. So it’s sort of a fluid thing to end up working with the right people for the right sets of ideas.

Daryl: Yeah, yeah. We seem to have a fairly—there’s a sort of a, I don’t know whether you call it a genre—there’s a theme that seems to run through a lot of our works, which has a very much ecological, environmental theme that we continue to explore.

Lacunae, to some degree, does actually possibly just sit on the outside of that a little bit. But the rest of our works have always had this more ecological component to it, and so a lot of the people we’ve collaborated with have some level of passion about that as well, I think.

Robin Petterd: An interesting thing with lots of media works—just actually wrestling with that sort of connection between nature and technology for lots of different reasons.

What the project teaches: when is a work finished?

Robin Petterd: So you sort of talked a little bit about that evolution. If you had to wrap it up in like one thing, what have you learned from the project over time?

Troy: I think one of the things that I’ve loved exploring with Lacunae is actually: when is a work finished?

It feels like it’s been a work that we have been able to explore different ideas within. These four iterations that we’ve done of it may seem like very similar kinds of work, but to me—and to us internally—they’re four different explorations of the same core ideas. And to us, they’ve actually manifested in quite different experiences, in the way that people actually interact with them.

Daryl: Yeah, I would agree with Troy. It certainly is just that idea that the work continues to evolve because there’s new ways to explore it. So every time we do it—because it is an installation work—it’s not stuck. It has this capacity to morph into something new. And that’s a really exciting thing for an artist.

Robin Petterd: As he was talking, it’s one of the things that’s really nice to hear—that it started as one idea and then became like a series that you keep on working on, not even refining, sometimes taking it into different directions over time.

So I really like, Troy, that you talked about the whole “when is something finished?” Because it’s a question people often ask. And I know I’ve sat there a couple of times and said: well, there’s a deadline, and that’s when I had to do it—fine—that’s when it’s—

Daryl: Finished. That’s a reality.

Troy: I feel like I’ve done a lot of work at—you know, when I was a student—assignments get finished. But, yeah, projects in art, they just get displayed.

I don’t think we’ve ever had a project that we wouldn’t have loved to have more time to explore and to really refine bits and pieces of. It’s often we’re working up to a deadline and you just need to get the thing out of there.

But it’s been really nice to go back to Lacunae a couple of times and continue to refine those ideas and find something new in it each time, and just think a little bit more about what an interaction means and how we can explore that a bit further.

Advice to artists: collaboration and reducing risk

Robin Petterd: What do you agree greatest piece of advice to another artists or group of people thinking about developing a piece cyclone,

Daryl: If I know Troy and some of the hair pulling that goes on, it’s: be very careful of how you move forward.

And I loved working with Troy and James, because they know their stuff so well in terms of technology. So it’s really having that great team around you—the team spirit, a team process where you can actually work together and solve problems together.

So I think, you know, if it’s a team—if it’s a group of people—be open and willing to explore and trust each other with what you’re trying to do.

Troy: Yeah, I think for me, as Soma Lumia has evolved as we’ve made more works, a lot of my role in Soma Lumia is about reducing the technological risk of our projects.

And the further that we go, the more refined the role of technology has become in our projects, to the point where we’re trying to do more things with less technology. And I really feel like we’re getting better and better at saying more with technology by using less of it.

And even, you know, a work like Lacunae, which—there is no escaping the fact that there’s a lot of technology there—we have still continued to evolve that work to make better use of the technology and almost downplay how important it is to the work. To me, it’s going to sound strange, but it feels like a more human work, the more refinement that this project has had.

So always question, when you’re bringing technology into work, what it’s actually adding, and how can you find the most refined version of that along the journey.

Robin Petterd: That idea of risks, Troy, is a really powerful and useful one to a lot of people doing creative work. Don’t think about because, yeah, it’s—

Troy: It’s the thing that keeps me up at night. Every time—I love, I get such immense satisfaction out of Soma Lumia works going out to the public and being on display. But there’s always that little bit of: did we do enough? Have we tested things well enough to be confident that this technology is going to stay up?

And we’ve never had a major disaster on a project, but there’s been plenty of sleepless nights along the journey as well.