THE FLOODS is an immersive experience that reframes questions of sea-level rise, migration and extinction, in which familiar places — and the memories and dreams that attend them — are transformed by rising waters. The work gives rise to acts of recognition, utterance and transformation. The generative and combinatory code produces a spectacle following Roderick Coover’s journeys along shorelines around the world to question underlying structures of industrialization and the Anthropocene that drive the current, catastrophic prospects of global warming. Drawing together images filmed on the Costa Brava around Barcelona as well as on the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea, THE FLOODS addresses questions of land-use, industrial contamination and sea-level rise through richly layered images, sound and generated language. Coover’s images, gathered over the past decade from journeys on and around shorelines, combine with field recordings, voices and electronic music composed by Adam Vidiksis. 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. Structural arcs in the code carry viewers across experiences of observation, transformation, longing, loss and possibility. 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.

Recent collaborative works created by Roderick Coover, Adam VIdiksis and Nick Montfort include THE FLOODS, WATER ON THE PIER, THE ALTERING SHORES, LOCATIVE SHORES, and IT WILL HAPPEN HERE IN BARCELONA, featured in the 2022 ISEA Festival.

Temple University

roderickcoover@gmail.com