Monica Chang – Looking Outwards – 04

Meandering River by onformative and Funkhaus Berlin Sound Chamber

meandering river

Meandering River is an audiovisual art installation created by onformative and FunkHaus Berlin Sound Chamber. This collaboration decided to use algorithms to work rhythmically along with music to create this real-time generated visuals which imitate the natural fluctuation of river landscapes.

This audiovisual landscape spans across multiple screens utilizing the birds-eye view of the landscapes which shows the shape-shifting of surface more clearly. Using musical composition created by the Google Magenta Performance RNN learning model, the team was able to come up with a collection of computational strategies that would eventually translate these musical phrases into visual structures of the animation.

What really gravitated me towards this project was the idea of music/sound values conducting the way that a generated landscape forms and moves. Scientifically, we know bodies of water( in this case, rivers) normally erode the land to form these beautiful forms of land across the Earth. To see an alternative way( despite it being completely imaginary and digital ) to create land was very fascinating to me.

Some of the smaller things I also admired were the choice of colors and the use of various textures for each landscape. With this, the artists were able to create a sense of time over multiple imaginary landscapes as if we were to travel/explore through each region of this digitally-rendered planet.