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Stratum is a river I built for Elite Merit’s office in Dubai. It runs on the company’s monthly revenue.
The river came first, though. For years I’d been quietly sitting on a subject I wanted to work with: meandering rivers.
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I first came across them through onformative’s Meandering River. It’s a beautiful piece. Go see it if you can. That’s where I learned that the lazy, looping bends we see in rivers took water centuries to wear away and build up, bit by bit. To me, a river is like a patient old craftsman. It only moves things a little at a time, but give it long enough and the whole landscape grows into the shape it had in mind. Back then I had no idea what to do with any of this, so I tossed it into my idea pool.
Then Collab invited me to make a data-driven piece for Elite Merit. Meandering rivers were the first idea that came to mind.
The client wanted the piece to run on revenue, which updates once a month. I’d made work that responds to touch, hand gestures and breath. This was probably the slowest input I’d ever worked with. My first question was: what do you do with a number that only moves once a month?
The longer I thought about it, the more the slowness made sense. A month is slow for me. For a river, it’s barely anything. That patient old craftsman wouldn’t even look up.
So I sped mine up until a month meant something to it. In Stratum, every second is a few days in the river’s life. Between one number and the next, it lives through tens of thousands of years.
What if a river’s headwaters were a company’s monthly revenue?
Meanders are usually seen from above, where you can take in the whole shape. I wanted to be down in the channel instead, watching the river flow past between the rock walls. That’s the view on the LED wall at the end of the boardroom table: rock worn smooth on both sides, and water running through it, glowing, full of tiny points of light. From down there you never see the whole river. Just the stretch you’re in.
The water never stops moving, and what it carries is the revenue. Once a month a new number arrives. How much comes in, and whether it meets expectations, decide how wide the river runs and how rough the land on either side gets. Then, for the rest of the month, the river and its banks keep pushing against each other, slowly carving out new ground.
So the land in front of you is, more or less, what this company looks like after everything it’s been through. What you see is only the top layer. Every month before it is folded in underneath, and even I couldn’t tell you which bend was carved in which month. That’s why it’s called Stratum: one layer.
Sit through an hour-long meeting in that boardroom, and by the time you stand up, the river has lived through a few decades.
How A River Meanders
A meander is a bend in a river that won't stay put. Water moves faster around the outside of a bend, so it keeps eating into that bank. On the inside it slows down and drops the sand and mud it was carrying. One side wears away, the other builds up, and the bend slowly swings wider.
Give it enough time and two bends grow close enough to touch. The river takes the shortcut, and the old loop is left behind as a crescent-shaped lake, an oxbow.
The satellite images below are from
ESA.
The Simulation
This is how the meandering river algorithm works behind the project.
It basically keeps expanding and squeezing the river, and once two curves touch each other, the loop becomes an oxbow.
During the early research stage, I tried to find every possible way to visualize it, and it turned out there were far more than I expected.
They're only 2D, but they still inspired me a lot for the 3D work.
Each of these studies runs the river through 1800 years, sped up, obviously.
On the wall in Dubai, a few days pass every second, so those 1800 years would take more than a day.
The videos below show how I applied the algorithm's final result to the 3D world.
The terrain's roughness and the river's width are both triggered by the revenue and the monthly target completion rate.
The numbers set the river once a month. The carving in between is the river's own.
On site
Installation at Elite Merit's office in Dubai
