Harbor

Harbor 2020 extends the earlier Harbor 6, drawing on NYC Harbor Water Quality data logged across all five boroughs throughout 2020. When NYC’s combined sewer system is overextended with wastewater and rain run-off, the untreated water overflows into waterways. The piece maps a year of daily water samples, recording fecal coliform levels, sample depth, and wet/dry weather conditions, etc., into a roughly hour-long piece. It compresses the rhythms of environmental monitoring into an encounter with urban ecological fracture. That the data comes from 2020 carries its own weight: the pandemic’s reduction in shipping traffic improved water quality in New York’s rivers, meaning one biological crisis was quietly tempering another. The harbor recorded here is neither simply degraded nor recovered, but caught in a strange interval where ordinary harm has been briefly interrupted.

While the piece uses data sonification, it avoids the easy promises of clarity that can plague data. Sound is built from layered sine waves with slightly off frequencies, producing slow beating interference patterns as an acoustic analog to the indeterminate, accumulative nature of the contamination of the blooms. Gaussian runs of piano notes are transposed and generated by cumulative rainfall which further entangle natural process and algorithmic procedure, blurring the line between found data and generated form.

Visually, the piece is organized around a kind of spatial uncertainty. The camera remains submerged, always beneath the surface, tracing the locations of water samples through scratchy, iterated lines that accumulate into a kind of scaffolding. Where these lines intersect they produce reticles (kinda like crosshairs) that carry the visual grammar of precision instruments and surveying tools, yet whose promise of spatial fixity the work refuses. Against this grid, fecal coliform blooms grow, implode, and recur with a lurid materiality. The blooms exist outside the perspectival logic governing the land, scaled to the screen rather than to space, hovering between surface and depth and never quite belonging to the world they appear to inhabit. Land undulates and tears. The camera drifts, then jerks. The work cultivates a kind of infrastructural unease in which the combined sewer overflow the data records is not abstracted but felt as a condition of instability where no register, visual or sonic, fully holds.

Harbor 6 explores where urban water systems (and their overflow) meet ocean water systems. It was made from NY Harbor Water Quality data (sourced from NYC OpenData). This piece uses data from daily water samples from 2020— including weather conditions (wet or dry), sample depth, and fecal coliform bacteria levels. When NYC’s combined sewer system is overextended with wastewater and rain run-off, the untreated water overflows into waterways. The data shows a correlation between wet days and fecal coliform levels. The tempo shifts to adapt for days where multiple samples were taken (each day is consistent in time— some days have 1 note; some have multiple).