Project: Future Arts Residency Program- Augment Seattle

Project Type: Installation + Augmented Reality

Location: BUMBERSHOOT - an arts music festival at Seattle Center

Year: 2023

Adapted from the earlier Parasitic Healing Bath installation, Bath Benches transforms the healing waterfall concept into a deeply personal augmented reality experience. Instead of overlaying a building façade, this version invites participants to immerse their own bodies—specifically, their faces—into a digital healing bath through an AR filter that visualizes medicinal, spiritual, and ancestral plants cascading gently across the screen.

Designed for the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, the project combines wearable technology and botanical storytelling to center the body as a site of restoration. Inspired by African traditions of plant-based healing baths, the piece overlays spiritual plant beings from African and Coast Salish ecologies—inviting a moment of reflection, reconnection, and imagined care.

As lead artist and creative director, Divine Ndemeye developed the conceptual and visual framework, collaborating with Houdini Interactive to bring the experience into an accessible, mobile format. The piece gestures toward digital ritual as a future medicine—reclaiming the screen as a portal for ecological intimacy and cultural memory.

In a public festival space often saturated with overstimulation, Bath Benches offered a quiet, embodied act of healing through speculative technology.

Experience the Healing bath on mobile devices here