“Aromatherapy” is a utopian-inspired world of animated work by Noor Bondogji. This world consists of a natural landscape that leads you to a modern gallery of different works of animation that deals with different types of positive energy in an open space. The gallery has different scenes of animation that plays with vibrant colors, movement, and feels. The project is about virtual senses that people feel when immersed in the world. It is about taking in positive energy in different forms, such as scenery, colors, and sounds. When you enter the world, you will follow the character to the installation and explore the different animations on the walls.
Noor Bondogji is a Bay Area native from Santa Clara, California. Having grown up in the heart of Silicon Valley, Noor has developed a love for digital media art with influence in animation and digital illustration. Throughout the course of her education at San Jose State University, she has learned a variety of programs such as Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Maya, Blender, Python, JavaScript, Fusion 360, and many others. Her work excels in the use of playing with colors, space, and creating a realistic virtual environment with minimalism and prefers her audience to fill in the open space with a sense of movement and emotion. Noor's goal after graduation is to pursue a career in Motion Graphics and Visual Effects for companies like Pixar or Apple where she can hone her skills in the tech world and unite virtual worlds into an actual reality.
When audiences explore Digital Autonomy, they will come across Dome 2 where my piece is displayed along with my co-artists in the gallery. My installation introduction is of a cube with a video mesh of animation of an animated character used as a guide that will lead the audiences into the utopian world I built in Blender and incorporated into the Newart.City platform. Aromatherapy is defined as a holistic treatment that uses natural plant extracts to promote health, well-being and promotes relaxation and helps relieve stress. The choice of title is to achieve that same result in my world of embodying promotion of health, well-being and relief in a virtual sense.
The research for Aromatherapy was heavily focused on what “defines” our relationship with positive energy in our physical reality and how can we emulate those feelings into our virtual reality? Using my personal experiences of positive flow I created four different scenes of “mini realities” with embedded audios to create different feeling emotions in a virtual open space. The inspiration came from exploring what I do in real time such as, spending time with family/friends, taking a walk, and having me time and getting coffee. We experience so much fragmentation of thoughts and feelings in life that we forget to stop and take a breather. So for me, creating this world ties the definition of “Aromatherapy” back together in a physical sense while building my own actuality on a virtual and digital platform.
Aromatherapy was all constructed in Blender where each animation loop and the installation terrain are created with geometric shapes and plenty of digital manipulation to achieve the desired effect of a virtual natural environment. My artwork plays with vibrancy (of colors) and playfulness (of settings), movement and emotion/relaxation in some cases. I like to create work with open spaces that allows the audience to roam and express any emotion in the negative and positive spaces - with the question in mind, “what can their mind fill in?” Ultimately, I leave this world in the digital reality for others to use and explore their Aromatherapy at the comfort of their screens anywhere they are.