Tropical swerve

Transmedia project, with artworks:

A knot in motion, 2023
Generative web poem
Voice, text, archive, algorithm, p5.js
https://webresidencies.akademie-solitude.de/knot-in-motion/ 

At the periphery of events, 2023
4k digital video, 2:30min loop

Tropical swerve departs from a research visit to the ecological base of Serra do Japi, near the Tropic of Capricorn, upon my return after many years to my hometown of Jundiaí. The project emerged from this affective return and from the tension between, on the one hand, technical attempts to sense, monitor, and predict the changing environment and, on the other, the growing evidence that climate instability exceeds technical control. At the periphery of events documents rainfall over the span of 2:30 minutes, tracing its effects at the peripheries of events remained uncaptured by data and control.

A knot in motion sought to connect local experiences of climate demise across the tropics. Through an open call to artists, poets, and writers who speak with and through these effects, an archive of voiced texts began to be developed. Building upon a fiction in which the two tropical lines were tied in a knot, a generative web poem was created to display this archive. Within it, the trope of rain appears as drops of affect, voice, and words pouring according to data collected at local ecological bases. As such, the poem operates as a "strange attractor" of knowledge and relation heard and visualized as a poem unfolding in plurality according to the presence of rain across both sites, open to new forms of plural inclusion.