Ripple invites participants to perceive themselves as temporary force fields, interacting and shaping their environment through complex relationships. A tracking system translates the participants’ positions into visible disturbances, while the sonification of historical rainfall measurements plays in the background. As participants move across the environment, their individual effects merge to form a generative system, making it impossible to distinguish one’s own impact from that of others. This blurring of boundaries leads to a dissolution of subjectivity, transforming participants into relational knots. In this way, Ripple invites to reflect on our place within the inherent chaos of existence and our attempts to impose order upon it.

CREDITS

Maria Orciuoli, Ripple was developed using the Processing programming environment, under the technical guidance of Sen.Art. Mag.art. Holunder Heiß from the Time-based & Interactive Media department of University of Art & Design Linz. The rainfall data sonification was created in Max/ MSP using the ClimateEngine’s 2011-2021 TerraClimate dataset, processed by Google Earth and obtained from NOAA and NASA by the University of Idaho’s researchers.