Installation: THE FLOODS

Monday June 26, 2023
5:00-6:00pm EDT
Multimedia Room, Western Michigan University

A Large Scale Installation and Live Concert Spectacle

For the live performance accompanying this installation, see The Floods Live Performance.

Roderick Coover - Adam Vidiksis - Nick Montfort

NOTES

THE FLOODS is a video experience that immerses spectators in a kaleidoscopic journey in marshlands and industrial wastelands of the Anthropocene now being transformed by floods.

The work addresses questions of land-use, industrial contamination and sea-level rise through richly layered images, sound and generated language. Viewers travel along the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local watershed and others worldwide that are shaped by industrialization. The sounds, images and text flow like waters, following a computer-code based system that gathers materials together in ever-changing experiences. Like ocean tides, the code-driven work is always changing.

Roderick Coover’s images, gathered over the past decade from journeys on and around our rivers, combined with field recordings, voices and electronic sounds composed by Adam Vidiksis, activate the unique reverberation of the space. 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. 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.

Suitable for all ages, THE FLOODS stimulates the imagination to find ways to make sense of the environment and climate change. Average viewing time for the ever-changing experience is 25-50 minutes. Viewers can move about the space or make use of optional seating.