Note: This is part of the active AquaSavvy project. We’re prototyping ideas for rending the data into the visualisation tool.
The conversation started with “How can we visualise our emotions and responses to water?”
In the consortium, we've been a bit stuck on this, as a group we're too sciencey and analytical. So we've been throwing ideas around but they all seem very mechanical to me. After a conversation with Birgitte about a Danish landscape art initiative - Wadden Tide (Bringing in the Tide), I remembered one of my favourite artists - Ned Kahn.
Now I have been on a journey with Claude. It's been amazing. To get my messy disjointed ideas structured and have the insights that were so deeply buried brought out coherently. Maaaaaaaan, that feels nice. And this was another of those times.
I asked Claude: What sort of visualisations could you imagine by being inspired by Ned Kahn?
Of course, you ask the AI and it brings back a bunch of waffle that is more often useless than not. I was expecting some blah blah, but the first thing it brought back was:
Ned Kahn's whole move is refusing to represent the phenomenon — he makes the actual physical force visible instead of a picture of it. Fog is real fog, driven by real wind. Turbulence is real turbulence, made legible by thousands of hinged panels catching real air.
This representing the phenomenon directly, rather than try to translate emotion into some other data, I thought was a great idea. There's a different conversation happening about how to build this into a game mechanic, hopefully I remember to link it back here once that blog is done (I have so much in my head right now, it's a rollercoaster, proposal writing always does this to me).
The data inputs could then be three things.
1. The data from databases (open knowledge infrastructures) that we would think of as obvious - rainfall, maybe rainfall per person or over time or whatever, groundwater levels, those sciencey things.
2. Then user input, either people interacting with the visualisation directly, and this should ideally be more than one person, so a group in a room, or the whole internet (sentiments pulled from social media), whatever. In the visualisation below, hover your mouse over an area and see it change colour.
3. And then the grid points also responds to their immediate neighbours.
In this way the pattern itself, the way disturbance propagates unevenly across the grid, is the whole visualization.
This code was created with Claude, the data imports do not work yet, it's probably buggy, so this is really just at the idea stage, heavily prototyping. In theory, at least (the full html file works for this) you can adjust all the parameters via that button.
The underlying philosophy of this, according to Claude, is a Magnetic Anomaly / iron-filings logic — an invisible field made visible only through how thousands of tiny independent things react to it. For water-emotions this could be: you don't draw an emotion at all. You drop hundreds of small elements onto a surface and let a hidden field (which could genuinely be fed by someone's input, typing pressure, mic volume, cursor speed) organize them into visible lines, the way filings snap to a magnet. The "emotion" is never illustrated, only its effect on the crowd of small things is.
The common thread across all of it: Kahn trusts the phenomenon to be interesting on its own, at real scale, without a narrator.
How cool is that.