subscape is a collaboration between new media artist Sarah Waterson, new media artist and producer Kate Richards,  MaxMSP Programming by Jon Drummond

Waterson and Richards’ sub_scape installations and video engage and upend traditional notions of mapping. With their politico-grunge themes, gorgeous edgy effects and mash up techniques, the sub_scape projects have been exhibited to acclaim in Melbourne and Helsinki, and a video version shown at numerous Australian and international events. sub_scape is a real-time generative system for manipulating data streams. The software is extremely robust and will generate hours and hours of varied material by sampling, folding and remapping one data set onto another. Using elegant rules, sub_scape generates poetic ecologies of sound and image. The data sets can comprise data streams of video and audio, openGL data, and alphanumerical data - eg company reports, statistics, poems, seafloor height. What emerge from the system are aesthetic complexes and evolving patterns, along with anomalies, turbulence and recursive effects. The system exhibits confluence, paradox, metaphor and commentary, arising from the intriguing combinations of source data and formal strategies. sub_scape is a conjuring and evocative work aimed at the interstices of metaphorical and material space. It is a playful and ironic critique on the traditional politics and power dynamics of knowledge-through-mapping. By mapping one space into another and playing on the emergent aesthetic and sense-making behaviours of the datasets, by using the dynamics of turbulence, balance, recursive effect and pattern formation in the data, the sub_scape affect is more baroque than cartesian. sub_scapeCYCLE is the 3rd work in the sub_scape series. sub_scapeBALTIC used bathymetry and pollution statistics to evoke the confluence and difference of Australian desert and the Baltic sea; sub_scapePROOF took political reportage and TV confessional and cut it up with poetry and company reports. A 5” machinima made from sub_scapePROOF has been widely shown. Each iteration of sub_scape can be installed as a site-specific screen-based work.

- text taken from Sarah Waterson's website, 2014