OsmoScape

( Echoes of the Osmotic Landscape)

Water flows from the sky to the mountains, down the rivers, out to sea and up into the atmosphere where it is breathed in and merges with the human body. We are an assemblage of water packets, slightly salty, like the sea we came from. As Loren Eiseley put it, we’re a “concentration” of water, “that indescribable and liquid brew which is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time,” and on the day we’re born, we’re at high tide. After that, very quietly, the sea within us ebbs and ebbs, and as it goes … so do we

“OsmoScape” explores a graphical notation score, where data and graphs related to water have been arranged to form a sound score. This water-data has been collected specifically from the available data on the internet from government site, NGO, research papers of scientist and found images as data over the internet. Each dataset is related to a case study which together tells the story of water which ebbs between the animate and the inanimate landscape. The found data was then converted into an image using processing code that becomes the visual bases of a score, leading eventually to sound compositions being constructed out of user engagement via a WebApp. This is App is the culmination of three years of research which seeks to explore a new way of archiving data and sound.

Operating on the edge of science, this type of data-driven artistic experiment probes through data and sounds several aspects of water through its scarcity, politics, interdependency etc. and simultaneously explores methods of engaging audiences with complex scientific data and issues of environmental health.