Respiration of the Earth work
A world map breathes with ocean sounds. As the sea becomes more turbulent, the visual “pulse” of the Earth grows unstable and overheated.
About this work
Earth's Breath is a sound-interactive experiment created using p5.js. Two starkly contrasting ocean recordings drive the visual transformations in this piece. The world map expands and contracts in response to the amplitude of the audio, resembling a pair of slowly rising and falling lungs.
In Calm Ocean mode, Earth's “breathing” remains relatively steady and the overall palette stays in deep blue tones, conveying a fragile yet sustained equilibrium. When switching to Stormy Ocean mode, the scene reveals violent undulations, pronounced tremors and bright-coloured fissures, as if the climate system were struggling to maintain stability under extreme pressure.
Reflections on the work
In this project, I use sound, code and imagery to think about the environmental pressures facing our planet. By letting ocean sound-waves animate the “breathing” of a world map, I aim to suggest that climate change is more than a sequence of data points; it is a tangible form of instability that can be felt.
During production, I repeatedly encountered small errors in parameters, loops and visual details. These moments of failure helped me to understand creative coding as a practice that actively relies on trial and error, echoing discussions in class. This experience resonates with Armitage’s (2018) notion of “spaces to fail”, which argues that uncertainty and error in technical work can be productive and educational rather than purely negative.
As I continued developing the sketch, I began to accept these imperfections and read them as a metaphor for the Earth’s own respiration: natural systems are never entirely smooth or controllable. The alternation between calm and storm modes also mirrors my learning journey, moving from stability into tension and then finding a new rhythm. For me, creative coding therefore becomes not just technical execution, but a process of learning, adapting and understanding within conditions of uncertainty.
Reference
Armitage, J. 2018. Spaces to Fail in: Negotiating Gender, Community and Technology in Algorave. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. [Online]. 10(1), pp.31–45. [Accessed 14 April 2025]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.02 .