Verde Oscuro is a video mapping projection masking the Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) facade at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in combination with a  live native California plant installation, that was displayed on May  2, 2013.

Verde Oscuro is a metaphor about the history of a site that a building occupies today. The piece lasts 13 minutes using video and music to evoke the ecological history of DARC’s place in three eras: the past, the present, and the future. While the live plant installation indoors and outdoors intends to create an environment to perceive and feel the inherent goodness of plants but also to disperse native California plants in order to raise environmental community awareness.

Verde Oscuro seeks to channel a message: in the same place that was occupied once by a redwood forest and today houses a building, we can create a green building in the future, surrounded by native plant gardens, green roofs, and green walls.  I believe that envisioning the history of the Digital Arts Research Center’s space as a redwood forest some hundreds or thousands of years ago and being aware of the current architectural structure, enables us to imagine a future building living in harmony with nature.