Liquid Geographies

Audiovisual essay performance, 10’
Mase with Touchdesigner and Ableton Live
2021

In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, flooding has become a regular part of life. Recently, construction has begun on a 60-km ring dike that would surround the city center with a defensive wall to protect it from rising sea levels. Experts predict that the dike will merely displace the damage, protecting the wealthy center at the expense of the urban periphery.

This audiovisual essay is a meditation on infrastructure as an instrument of violence, and the allure of silver-bullet solutionism in the face of wicked problems. Water is the perfect rebuttal to the monolithic solution: any attempt to contain it merely displaces it elsewhere. Can infrastructure take on a fluid disposition? Can it be adaptive, soft, and regenerative? Generative software environments (Ableton Live and Touchdesigner) are used to mirror the complex, dynamic nature of this fluid landscape. Satellite imagery traces the contours of the future ring dike, while a soundscape is generated using field recordings from the region.