"I am writing to a rhythm, not to a plot. Does this convey anything?" - Virginia Woolf, 1930

waves, after Virginia Woolf is a multimedia installation uniting computer coding with organic materials to form a real time re-conceptualization of Virginia Woolf's experimental novel, The Waves. The project pulls random words from The Waves, a novel of internal soliloquy, and endows them with aqueous behaviors - pitching, sinking, and surfacing, like the internal waves of thought in the novel itself.

Sitting with the flow of the tossing words for a period of time will allow for old thoughts to become new and for the author's thoughts to inspire the viewer's - perhaps illuminating something about his or her emotional experience or state of mind.

Projected onto an actual body of water, the current of the text is directly influenced by and shifts according to real time tidal data from the River Ouse in East Sussex, where Woolf drowned herself on March 28, 1941. In this way, the installation also serves as a memorial for the author, symbolically casting the river as an eternal container for her life's work.

Materials: fish tank, water, black acrylic ink

May 2017