Wetlands by Lucy Hardcastle – poetically visualising data

Since it was set up in 2016, the Lucy Hardcastle Studio has become renowned for the sensory richness of its designs and animations. Lucy’s digital landscapes are so evocatively textured you feel as though you could reach out and touch them. She has a remarkable power to tell emotionally rich stories with no discernible characters. And, even when confined to the digital realm, her work has a powerful physicality – a certain kind of a sensuousness – to it.

Curious to see what that might mean? Take a look at the LHS 2020 reel:

The new digital piece Wetlands expresses this perfectly, but takes the studio’s work to an intriguing new level in the process. Developed for Lucy Hardcastle’s new website (lucyhardcastle.com), this new, self-initiated project appears at first glance to be a serene animation of an abstract landscape of valleys and ridges, pools and peaks, shrouded in flurries of blossom or snow, but look a little deeper and it reveals itself to be a living algorithm – a multilayered data visualisation of Lucy’s own neurological response to the sensation of touch, with which the viewer is then enticed to interact. You could, not inaccurately, describe it as an invitation to play with Lucy’s brain.

Neatly embodying the study’s vision and approach, as well as exhibiting its ability to transform complex data into emotive visuals, Wetlands is the result of a collaboration between the studio team, specialists from the field of neuroscience Lucy’s preconscious mind, and the user.  As they explore the landscape using their mouse or fingertips, they trigger colour transitions and wave motions, disturbing the particle flurries and flooding the pools. In effect, the intersection of the user’s brain as expressed through their conscious motion and Lucy’s brain, as expressed through unconscious response, creates an engrossing, ever-changing  and unique digital environment.

“We chose to use my sensitivity to materials as an area of exploration and data extraction, creating a visualised algorithm that is as much living and breathing as I am. The outcome is a digital landscape in a constant state of change between the data and the individual user’s input.” 

– Lucy Hardcastle

To develop the visualisations, Lucy participated in ‘material meditation’ sessions, with a wearable headset to track her neural responses to sensory contact with a variety of materials, chosen because they either feature in, or resonate with, the studio’s practice. They included glass, suede, acetate, slime, silicone rubber, sandpaper and silk, while she was in a closed-eye meditative state. As well as taking data points from her brain activity while she was in contact with each material, Lucy’s heart rate and breath patterns were recorded using sensors. A Plain paper was used a textural ‘control’ between materials, and each session was repeated, at a different times of day, and the two sets of readings were overlapped to ensure consistency and eliminate anomalies. These were then used to generate linear waves, graphs and cross-sections – the building blocks of a digital landscape, shaped entirely by Lucy’s own bodily response to sensory stimulation. A visualisation of the invisible.

You don’t have to understand the rationale or complex technology behind it to appreciate the haunting beauty of Wetlands – and many people will no doubt visit the Lucy Hardcastle site and interact with it without realising the depth of the thinking behind it – but having an insight into the ambition and complexity behind this unique digital artwork only makes it more extraordinary.

Explore Wetlands now at lucyhardcastle.com.