The River of Words [Waal van Woorden]  is going places! It was exhibited at Rivierenland water board earlier, and now the Delft Waterboard (Hoogheemraadschap van Delftland) wants it to be part of an exhibit they are organising as part of their 735 ! birthday celebration, under the title  ‘we and water’. Exiting! It made me revisit the work, and realised that time has moved on – the Ventuz software that I based it on is now on version number 8, where I used 4. The laptop I run the presentation version on is also not the youngest – the word ‘obsolete’ comes to mind –  it has a few bad habits that interfere with the smooth flowing of the river. Moving my Ventuz 4 licence to another laptop turned out to be a no-go: cannot download the installation software for version 4 any more, did not have the original installation software any more.

All reasons to see if I could recreate the work on another software platform so it would be more stable and more portable. I have some experience with Processing .  So I set myself the goal to recreate the app on a totally different – and slightly less sophisticated – platform. A week of fast and furious coding later – I can really really get stuck into writing software – I can say that I succeeded. The image shows my workspace (in this case: my kitchen table) with the squiggles and scribbles I needed to solve the last bug. 

It feels good that I can now offer the Hoogheemraadschap a more stable version. Sometimes I wish I ‘just’ painted – no issues with legacy software, laptops getting ideas of their own, power outs and other nasty things. A

I will install the River in Delft just before going off to New York to visit family and friends, so any maintenance – if needed – will have to be done remote. Anyways, the whole exercise gave me a sense of accomplishment ánd more peace of mind. What’s not to like?

The River also has a date with museum Flehite in Amersfoort. They plan an exhibition ‘the city and the water’ that is expected to run from july until october ’24. I’ll be trying out what it will be like to beamer the words – the exhibition space is big so the curator asked me for ideas to scale the thing up. I will do some try-outs in the coming weeks to see if using a beamer works for me.