Richard A Carter
Waveform, (2020)
Abridged version of the full 10 minute film
Waveform is a speculative instance of ‘drone generated poetry’, meditating on the role of digital sensors in contemporary environmental monitoring, and exploring modes of capturing and expressing sensory data that depicts it not as an autonomous mirror of the observed, but as emerging out of exchanges between different sensing and interpreting agencies, both human and nonhuman. In this project, coastal shorelines are imaged using an airborne camera drone. The data gathered is then analysed using a machine vision algorithm that attempts to trace the nebulous boundary between wave and shore—a process whose inherent ambiguity exposes the functional contingencies and encoded thresholds of the system. The marker points that define this boundary then supply a sequence of weighted variables for another algorithm that generates enigmatic, poem-like texts, which are curated to engage themes concerning the maritime environment, the perils and absurdities of life in a rapidly degenerating climate, and the interrelated acts of sensing, measuring, and knowing.
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