Art and Climate Change

The water from the mountains would flow to the ocean naturally, just not this way, that fast, and as dirty. To show a part of this massive process, Niemeyer sonified and visualized a year’s worth of water data (2020) from his home town, Richmond CA as a short data music video. He combined the visual and sonic data manifestations with a long 360˚ video pan he filmed at the West County Wastewater District’s Water Quality and Resource Reclamation Plant in Richmond. The resulting music video was first presented at the Water Inspiration conference in Ghent, Netherlands. An excerpt of that presentation is linked below.

Process: Making this video required exploratory data analysis, photography, animation and sound synthesis. The four processes all are interdependent, because in the end, they all need to come together into a durational whole, a durational entity. Niemeyer handled data from four separate sources in python, filling in NaN data, fixing timestamp errors, and harmonizing all the time series. In the end, he generated a time series with 8784 data points (one for every hour over 366 days] for sea levels, rain levels, wastewater inflow and wastewater outflow.

He brought this data into processing as a .csv file and converted it into a handy data object. He based all animations and sound syntheses on the data, showing row of the data every 1/30 of a second. He introduced rhythmic structures based on the seven days a week, and he tuned arrays of sine oscillators to produce the sounds based on the data levels. There is a wave voice, a wastewater voice for the hourly levels, a second wastewater voice for the daily averages, and a rain voice. The four graphic elements are three time series graphs and a rain graphic, all animated by the data, frame by frame.

In a last synthesis step, Niemeyer layered the graphics and the sound onto the on-site video in After Effects. He left the original sound of the video in the mix, because it added depth. The recorded sound anchored the synthetic sounds in its richer timbre.

The resulting music video of sorts seeks to show how water operates at different time scales. It’s a poetic reading of big climate change data. Water is at the same time a compound older than the solar system. It is also what most of us consider fresh and refreshing, more than anything else. It is also what we consider most repulsive when mixed with the fats, germs and proteins of human waste. How can we not revere water in all its forms?

To read the complete article and view the video, please visit: https://www.gregniemeyer.com/flowstobay