Liquid Prairie: Creeping Change is an projection installation documenting the cyclical nature of the spring melt along a frozen floodway in central Canada. Over a twelve hour period a software program mixes forty-six images pixel by pixel, showing wind swept snowdrifts slowly giving way to a grass prairie.
Between February and May 2007 I walked 46 km along a floodway channel built to divert flood waters away from the city I live in. I broke the journey into 9 walks taking one photograph for every kilometer walked, I averaged 5 km per walk and a time of roughly 2 hours each. I used this data; time, distance, temperature, and wind-chill, to create the sequencing structure of the software program.
In Liquid Prairie: Creeping Change I present a scenario where the laptop acts as an environment and the software represents an external process built to utilize the resources of the laptop. In the projection installation the images are mixed in real-time by the software running on a 12 hour cycle. The software runs continually without pause over the length of the festival, taxing a laptop computer to it's operational limits. As the computer runs day and night sequencing errors begin to emerge, established patterns become corrupted and the computer's system becomes unstable. The result is the images begin to be shown out of order and the melt cycle from winter to spring is corrupted. This work models how established patterns of seasonal change can be effected by external human pressures.
