Turning the Tide on Climate Change Visibility
The five water cylinders that comprise the physical reservoir computer built by Prof. Offenhuber and his team (courtesy photo from Northeastern Global News)
Although rising sea levels fueled by climate change threaten to accelerate the sinking of Venice, the pace is not readily visible. “If you look at these slow changes, you can’t really perceive them,” says Professor of Design and Public Policy Dietmar Offenhuber, but “we can harness environmental systems to make those changes more apparent.”
Prof. Offenhuber and his Northeastern colleagues are changing perceptions with a project they created for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Italy. They have applied the principles of physical reservoir computing to conceive of the city of Venice itself “as a computer, as an environment that processes information.”
Prof. Offenhuber and his team designed a group of columns that mimic changes in the Venetian canals as the tides flow in and out. The columns receive live video feeds from water services around the city and then simulate the reservoir part of the system. The system learns to interpret these patterns that it observes in this reservoir and outputs light to a series of RGB cubes.
The water computer offers a lens that renders otherwise imperceptible climate impacts visible. “We can,” says Prof. Offenhuber, to “look at environmental processes in a much broader scale.”