Data Waves in the Rising Sun

Data Waves in the Rising Sun is a computational poem, a generative rewriting of Virginia Woolf’s meditative descriptions of the sun over water in The Waves.

Like its counterpart Data Lakes in the Waning Moon — which reimagined James Joyce’s ode to water in Ulysses — this work employs a script that ceaselessly reshuffles Woolf’s text, creating a visual poem of glittering sunlight on water. Meaning is dissolved and recomposed into ever-shifting patterns, where words shimmer with new rhythms, texture, and variation.

The piece is at once an homage and a transformation, regenerating Woolf’s words through code, animating them into ever-moving streams of language. What was once still becomes a computational current, flowing and alive, like Woolf’s streams of consciousness.

The other piece of the diptych, Data Lakes in the Waning Moon, was originally created for the exhibition La Poétique de l’Eau by Danae and 1703, curated by Elisabeth Karolyi.