OsmoScape: Echoes of the Osmotic Landscape

RESEARCH QUESTION

How can different display and interactive strategies be used to stimulate people’s involvement with issues of environmental health and scientific data, particularly focusing on critical ‘water’ related issues?

DESCRIPTION

“OSMOSCAPE: Echoes of the Osmotic landscape” explores a graphical notation score, where 50 data-sets related to water are arranged to form a sound score in the form of a WebApp, Book and Installation. The under belly of this project stems from social based practise where it seeks to explore an experimental data archive which can be intuitively understood through a sound, text and data based interactions. Osmoscape traces the deep interrelations and complexity of water with its natural environment and simultaneously traces the exponential impact of the anthropocene through the perspective of biology, chemistry, design and technology. Critical data related to water in different local and global contexts has been collected with experts from reliable online resources such as government sites, NGO and, hacked scientific research papers.  Each dataset in the score is a gateway and related to a case study, which is expanded to a story connecting the intricate relationship between the landscape, waterscape and humanscape.

The intention of this data-driven artistic experiment is to probe 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. It seeks user across the spectrum surpassing language/ income/ economic barrier and therefore assimilating as a WebApp which is accessible on the most basic smart phone in low income areas. “Osmoscape’s” design is fluid and expressible in multiple forms(museums to street based activation), so that a large number of people can find different access points to this open source WebApp.

The data is a combination of planetary and local case studies that connect the macro and micro effects to generate deeper conversation on the flawed patterns in our current ecological system design. Osmoscape is open source, and it seeks to explore a different way of archiving data that can be intuitively understood through sound interactions, where further curiosity leading to 50  scientific stories. The premise of the WebApp is to activate user learning through creativity and play, via building a multi layered sound composition that could be constructed out of user engagement and be shareable over the Internet or inducing live performance via mobile/iPad engagement.

Osmoscape attempts to tell a larger narrative covering case studies on the path of water from space, to atmosphere, glacier, river and finally ebbing into the ocean. The narrative of the score starts from the dataset of a water signature to seek life in space, to how water plays a major role in the incubation of life, shaping the DNA to retain the code and attempts to understand the structure of water that leads it to become a universal solvent. This further goes on to explore the impact of population through industrialization, various ways we are polluting the rivers, increase in C02 and drawing patterns towards climatic disruptions and stressed water resources etc. The narrative seeks for similar case studies that show repeated patterns emerging due to industrialization, use of bad technology or bad policy.

Different ranges of techniques have been applied to compute different coherent visual and sound representations, aimed to become elements in an art installation. The score-scape employs aesthetics in order to seduce the user attention on an initial level and utilizes sound to slow down time, in order to create a space for information intake.