Studio 5 - Coding the actual sea level to the potentiometer
I had 2 ways to go about showing how high sea levels get. The first way was to get a reading of how high the sea level will rise in 2150, and then just have the sea level rise on a constant average from the year 2000 to the year 2150.
The second way was to get readings from every year and actually show how high the sea level would rise over the course of the years up to 2150, and show how it would rapidly increase over time.
I wanted to do the second way because it was more realistic and showed the users that sea levels don’t just rise at a constant rate, that it is rapidly increasing as time goes on.
To do this, I needed a graph or something to go by to get readings for every year. I searched around and eventually found a report from Ministry for the Environment from the NZ Government (report here).
I found a graph that showed different variations of of sea levels rise over the next 200 years. The different variations showed the results from different tests, based on how much we reduce the effects of global warming. For my installation, I decided to go with the worst of the worst, so this would get a better reaction.
I took the graph, put it into Illustrator, and drew horizontal and vertical lines over it to get accurate readings for every 5 years. I then just filled in the middle numbers with logical guesses.
I thought that I would be able to get a formula that would create the line, and then be able to just add that to my program which would make the sea level rise appropriately, however, trying to get the formula by using Excel didn’t work. So I had to resort to just repeating the code over and over again, and changing the numbers to represent each year and what I wanted the sea level to do.
For example using the picture above:
howHigh represents the current year that the user has input from the clock, 1 being 2001, 2 being 2002 and so on.
HOW represents how high I want the video file, or the sea level, to rise.
The same code is repeated over and over for every year, until it reaches 150 (2150) at which the video file is at the top.
This accurately showed the rise of sea level, when projected onto a screen with the height at 1.8 meters.
As stated in previous blogs, i’m no genius at coding and haven’t done it in years, so the fact that I was able to do this (and first time might I add) was quite surprising to me and was quite the achievement. It might be a very butchered way of doing it, but it works.















