It Will Happen Here: Estuaries
Info
Presented at the SEAMUS 2023 National Conference at the DiMenna Center in New York City
April 8, 2023
About
It Will Happen Here: Estuaries is a mobile video and sound experience that reframes questions of sea-level rise, migration and extinction, in which familiar places — and the memories and dreams that attend them — are transformed by rising waters. The work gives rise to acts of recognition, utterance and transformation. The videos follow Roderick Coover’s journeys along Philadelphia’s waterways, the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, to question underlying structures of industrialization and the Anthropocene that drive the current, catastrophic prospects of global warming. Coover’s images, gathered over the past decade from journeys on and around shorelines, combine with electronic music composed by Adam Vidiksis. Nick Montfort draws from Coover’s logs to create a continually evolving, poetic text. The remarkable spectacle reveals forces of flow, floods and chemical contamination. Structural arcs in the code carry viewers across experiences of observation, transformation, longing, loss and possibility. Visitors plunge into the imaginaries of times present and future in a work that attempts to put into words the unspeakable threats posed to existence, time and belonging. This work is a preview of the larger It Will Happen Here series created by Coover & Vidiksis. The large format of the accepted installation was not able to be accommodated for this conference. Estuaries is a glimpse into the immersive experience of It Will Happen Here: THE FLOODS, an algorithmically driven, large-scale installation that immerses viewers in a kaleidoscope of climate futures set in on urban shores, marshlands and industrial wastelands around the world. For more information on the series, please go to itwillhappenhere.net.
Artist Bios
Roderick Coover is film director/media artist and the creator of experimental and emergent cinematic arts work exhibited in art venues and public spaces such as the Venice Biennale Hyper-Pavilions, The Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Documenta MadridHe lives in Pennsylvania, USA, and Drôme, France.
Adam Vidiksis is a drummer and composer based in Philadelphia who explores social structures, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. He performs in SPLICE Ensemble and the Transonic Orchestra and his works are available through HoneyRock Publishing, EMPiRE, New Focus, PARMA, and SEAMUS Records.
Nick Montfort is the author of numerous computer-generated books of poetry including, among others #!, Autopia, The Truelist, and Hard West Turn and of the collaborative projects The Deletionist, Sea and Spar Between, and Renderings. Other books include Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press).
