Projects
Hydor
Hydor
How can immersive technologies translate water’s rhythms into collective, embodied experiences, where participants’ heartbeats shape responsive sound and visuals in real time?
Hrdor is a research project investigating how immersive arts can cultivate hydro-consciousness, an embodied awareness of water’s fragility in a world of increasing scarcity. Inspired by bio sonics, HYDOR uses water-based soundscapes to reveal environmental conditions that might otherwise go unnoticed. Listening to water’s sonic signatures allows participants to perceive movement, flow, and subtle changes in quality, complementing visual observation.
Explore
£5,000
Aims of the project
In this exploratory phase, the project prototypes immersive environments where participants’ heart rates drive responsive sound and visuals, creating feedback loops that align body, sound, and light. Participants act as co-creators, shaping the experience with their physiological rhythms.
We question:
• How can hydro-sonic environments translate water’s rhythms into collective experiences?
• How does synchronisation of body, sound, and light influence ritual-like connection among participants?
• Can immersive environments communicate water scarcity through sensory experience rather than didactic messaging?
Methodologically, sensors capture heart rates, water movement, and other environmental data. These inputs are sent via OSC to TouchDesigner, which translates them into dynamic, immersive audio-visual outputs. Hydrophone recordings from our canal-based narrowboat are transformed into distorted, audio-led “hydro-sonic roses” to inform both sound and visuals. Together, this system allows participants to feel and hear water’s presence, exploring collective resonance through embodied interaction.
Meet Hydor
Timothy Betton
Co-artist
he/him
Timothy Betton is an abstract landscape practitioner exploring fluidity and transitional bodies. His practice is informed by open-water swimming and yoga, using sustained movement, breath, and immersion as ways of engaging with aquatic space. Water operates as both subject and medium of transformation. Timothy investigates how landscapes can register flux and identity, producing environments that reflect shifting bodily and emotional terrains. His work considers attention, balance, and flow as spatial conditions, situating the body within landscapes understood as mutable and continuously reformed.
Will Edwards
Co-artist
he/him
Will Edwards researches hydro-consciousness at the Royal College of Art as part of the MA Architecture programme. His work develops the speculative initiative Hydro-Aesthetic Task Force (HATF), which examines cultural, political, and aesthetic conditions of water scarcity through site-specific interventions, architectural models, and immersive installations. Recent research centres on sonic score publications and methods for translating environmental sound into tangible exhibition formats. These publications function as exhibition structures, using printed scores, spatial notation, and material testing to extend sonic environments into architectural space and situate sound within aquatic and infrastructural contexts.
