100120 - jorinde voigt

Though I have included her website under the 'links' heading I think this work is so inspirational, beautiful, and relevant that I want to dedicate a post to it.  Jorinde Voigt's drawings deal with speed, volume, and movement.  They relate performance to geometry and they are explicitly about variation in time.  These drawings are not about fixing a form or image, but mapping transformations through time.

 

images via jorindevoigt.com

 
Clearly this is not the type of purely spatial data that normally comprises architectural drawings (see Stan Allen, "Diagrams Matter").  To convey physically intangible information like speed and movement, Voigt has developed notational systems (look for close up views of these systems on her website).  Notations can convey information about magnitude, relative position, duration, angle, etc.  Sheet music is an example of a notational system.

 

musical notations

Musical notations are a shared language that passes information easily among those who have learned to decode it.  On the other hand, Voigt's notations are a unique invention.  Looking at her drawings for the first time, one doesn't know all the details of how to read them.  One needs to understand the conventions of the system before the drawing can be fully decoded.       

So how does this relate to your sand dune mappings?

Well...in order to map information about organization, variation, and potential transformation in the dunescapes you will have to develop your own notational system.  Work through these steps as you begin the drawings, develop notations to address some (not necessarily all) of the following issues:

First, it is important to map how the morphology of the dunescapes changes across space.  Most dunescapes can be broken down to a unit – a particular shape that repeats across the field.  If you have chosen your dunescape well, this unit will be transforming across the field.  It will be getting larger, stretched out, more folded, or transforming in a different way.  Devise a notational technique to map this change across the dunescape.

Second, look at how the dunescape as a whole is organized.  What type of general dune morphology are you dealing with?  It is a ridge and valley system?  Is it a node system?  How does the overall organization change across the field?  What is the difference between the windward and leeward exposures?  What makes one dunescape organization different from another? 

Third, allow for the potential to speculate on how the dunescape might transform as it is exposed to the wind.  We know generally that dunes move sort of like other waves, but we do not have time-lapse images (as far as I know) to monitor this movement.  So instead, rely on the transformational principles you have gathered in your research to make an informed speculation on how your dunescapes would transform.