Counterpoints is a site-specific performance designed to explore boundaries between data and reality, define a sense of place, and test the limits between remote observation and experience. This project reimagines satellite imagery as a musical score, using geospatial and publicly available urban data as a basis for improvisation and spontaneous composition and offering viewers a way to experience a physical location on various levels at once.
How has our understanding of place, and specifically what it means to be in a physically embodied space during a global pandemic, shaped our experience of our surroundings? Satellite imagery from Planet's Fusion Monitoring data product offers a cloudless and un-interrupted daily view of locations around Brooklyn and Manhattan from 2018 through 2021 to show changes over time, while data from NYC’s Open Data collection (converted into prose scores) is interpreted by the performers. This data informs the audio improvisations and presents ways to experience and explore a sense of place from multiple perspectives simultaneously.
This repository contains the code used to process the images used in the project, as well as the code used analyze data from the NYC Open Data Archive that was used for the scores.
You can learn more about Counterpoints, and view the project and performances here.
Counterpoints premiered in March 2022 at The Hall in Brooklyn, NY for Data Through Design's NYC Open Data Week exhibition. The project is a collaboration between Mansi Shah (flute), Lucy Hatem (clarinet), and Torstein Johansen (bass).
Special thanks to the DxD team and Planet Labs for helping make this project possible. Thank you to Sara Safavi, Maya Midzik, Leanne Abraham, Sean Gillies, Julia Bloom, Marisa Johnson, Eric Volpert, and Duck Little for their support. The satellite imagery used in this project is courtesy of Planet Labs.