The Physical Geography of the Sea

Ships constantly broadcast their position over radio (AIS), and those signals carry for kilometers. For the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, I used them to draw a live map of the Bosphorus, showing how commercial traffic and natural currents intertwine in the strait.

A custom antenna array and a software-defined radio (SDR) captured AIS packets from passing ships, which open-source software decoded into positions and routes. The live data drove a computer-controlled analog projector whose rotating discs layered the ships' passages into an image projected into the room, while a terminal showed the succession of ships and routes.

The craft was in the translation: filtering noisy packets bouncing across the strait, and syncing the software with the projector's mechanical discs so the image stayed true to the real routes and currents.