Water Stories:
Visual Poetics and Collective Voices
2022

Water Stories: Visual Poetics and Collective Voices is a two-part project comprised of a community audio composition and a generative audio-reactive video work that brings together multiple points of view from local youth, community, and poets in Alaska as they share what water means in their life. Water Stories, by Andrea Wollensak, is the culmination of a year-long artist residency with the Anchorage Museum (2021-2022) that includes an audio composition broadcast at the Anchorage Museum and Out North Radio, live interactive poetry readings and video projections on the museum façade during November 2022. 

Visual Poetics.

Poets Erin Hollowell and Jen Stever, a museum writer-in-residence, created poems in collaboration with Wollensak’s residency. This collaboration focused on the intersections of place, writing, and visual forms of language that evolved into an interactive video in which the poet’s voice generates and modifies visual graphical forms via software code written in Processing. Water Stories: Visual Poetics explores visual and audio manifestations of language as a shared boundary between graphic design, writing, and performance.

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Collective Voices.

This work is an audio composition that amplifies voices of Alaskan youth and community through stories of what water means in their life. Teens from the museum's Teen Climate Communicators and the general public offer lyric reflections and their experiences with water. This project is in collaboration with Indra Arriaga Delgado, a Mexican artist, writer, and researcher working in Alaska. Water Stories: Collective Voices will be broadcast at the Anchorage Museum and at Out North Radio in Anchorage and is available on soundcloud.

The audio reactive video and audio processing was made in collaboration with programmer Bridget Baird and sound artist Brett Terry. Water Stories was funded by the VIA Arts Foundation, the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and Research Matters at Connecticut College.