What if stories had a physical impact?
We are shaping the world around us by telling stories to each other. I have recorded audio signals of some of these stories and let their frequencies affect procedurally generated terrains. The unique landscapes resulting from this process are snapshots of possible worlds in which certain imaginations have affected the world more than others.
This is a companion to the series “A Notion Is Formed”, which explores communication between people and its impact on their surroundings.
The world is a canvas
The terrains are generated using a custom program that I have written in JavaScript. The program uses the frequency waves of the audio recordings to affect the height of the terrain. The resulting landscapes are rendered in SVG formatInsted of pixels, this format describes vectors, which can be drawn by a plotter machine, which means they are resolution independent and can be scaled to any size.
Generative animation
The shapes are created via code, so they can be fairly easily animated. By shifting the random sampling offsets over time, you'll get an animation that looks like a living landscape.