wave · forms (by Joanna Selinger & Mayar el Hayawan)
For this audiovisual installation, the artists worked towards the visualization of natural phenomena, such as natural disasters. In this process of work, experimenting with sound felt logical to them, since it provided a different entryway into the displaying of natural data input. They decided to focus on tsunamis, and to concentrate on some of the major events of the past decade: 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia; 2009, the Samoa tsunami; 2011, the Tōhoku tsunami in Japan; and 2015, the tsunami that struck the coast of Chile.
With the help of the Sonifyer software (that translates data into sound) the artists were able to
produce audible frequencies from the seismographic data of these tsunamis. Departing from an extremely clinical study of the data, the artists released their artistic liberties to create an experimental sound piece using the audio they produced. They came up with the perfect input that allowed to make natural disasters visible in an extraordinary way, far from the very ubiquitous catastrophic documentary images of tsunamis. The overall idea was to create an audio reactive script that allowed one to see not only the epicenters, but also the movements and rise of the (audio) waves. Moreover, the waves accurately draw the shorelines of the actual places in which the tsunamis occurred, as well as they react to the physical boundaries of the projection screen.
wave · forms presents these natural phenomena as profoundly ingrained in our planet’s inner structure, which allow us to step out of our too-human anthropocentric world view, and for a moment, think and imagine beyond our senses the grounds on which we stand.