Liquid Memory: MS8507

Year: 2025

Dimensions: 240x135x5 px

Medium: Generative, Animation

Status: Completed

Liquid Memory: MS8507 is a generative artwork that transforms twenty-two years of oceanographic records into a field of flowing pixels. The work focuses on the Mediterranean Sea between October 1985 and September 2007 — the years I grew up in İzmir, a city on the Aegean coast and historically defined by its proximity to water. By translating measured environmental data into pixel motion, the piece connects the rhythms of the sea with the passage of lived time.

Liquid Memory: MS8597 Excerpt

The animation is driven by reconstructed monthly averages of significant wave height and wind speed, sourced from the Copernicus Marine Service (Mediterranean Waves Reanalysis). Each year of data is condensed into a 12-second cycle, with the full 22-year period unfolding across 4 minutes and 37 seconds. A grid of small squares tracks the seasons, while elongated bars indicate the years. Seasonal variation — calm summers and stormier winters — modulates the amplitude, frequency, and direction of the pixel flows. Interannual differences, shaped by both wave and wind data, further adjust these parameters, giving each cycle its own subtle identity.

The work is rendered in a minimal, pixel-based visual language inspired by late-1980s and 1990s home-computer graphics, a formative aesthetic from the my childhood. It is created with a custom program developed on the open-source game engine TIC-80. Liquid Memory: MS8507 binds place, time, and memory into a generative system: the sea’s measured rhythm becomes both a geographical archive and a personal register, while early computer aesthetics translate Mediterranean motion into a contemporary abstraction. The result is a data-driven meditation on how environment, history, and memory interweave.

Liquid Memory: MS8507 was created for the Mediterranean Biennial in Turkey in 2025.

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