Writing the River Rising

At the end of 2022 and through into 2023 my home community in the Riverland experienced a drawn-out flooding event along our stretch of the River Murray in regional South Australia. Country Arts SA commissioned me as a writer/creator to respond to the flood and our community experience of this event. 

Writing the River Rising is my response.

Writing the River Rising is a meditation on grief, on change, on community, on becoming ourselves, and my response to the recent Riverland flooding event and my (very) personal history of living and loving the Riverland.

Created in collaboration with Riverland artist and illustrator Daniel Giles and Adelaide-based interactive experience design company Sandpit, Writing the River Rising is live from Thurs 15 February 2024.

What is Writing the River Rising?

Writing the River Rising is a digital poetry experience made up of two separate but connected experiences, one in-person with your mobile phone and the other viewable from anywhere as a desktop web experience.

Each day over the course of a month you can visit any one of the five Riverland locations to reveal a new poem and answer an optional daily question using your personal mobile device. The experience uses augmented reality to layer each daily poem across the river landscapes that I call home. There will be handy signs with instructions and a QR code at each location.

Over the course of the month each of the daily poems and (hopefully) your responses will feed into a web-based artwork, slowly filling the screen with text. Daniel’s illustrations add moments of whimsy and you can click on daily poems to see the audience responses as the project grows. At the end of the month the website text will slowly disintegrate revealing one final poem. I’ll be writing this poem during the live period of the project, so it will directly respond to how the audience does (or doesn’t) interact with the daily questions.

When is Writing the River Rising?

Daily poems/questions (in-person): Thurs 15 Februrary 2024 to Sat 16 March 2024

Cumulative website experience (online): Thurs 15 February 2024 to Mon 25(ish) March 2024.

Where is Writing the River Rising?

Daily poems/questions locations:

The poem and question is different each day of the project, but each location is the same, so you can view and experience Writing the River Rising from whichever location is closest to you.

View the evolving website experience from wherever you are:

https://riverrising.countryarts.org.au

Writing the River Rising reinterprets and responds to the digital documentation and physical experience of the 2022/2023 Riverland flood event, including flood watch email alerts, public Facebook updates from all levels of government and emergency services, and community discussion and sharing in Facebook groups like River Murray Floodwatch, and my own documentation and experience of the floods while they were happening (including photos, phone notes, text messages to friends etc).

Artist Talk and Reading

I will be presenting an artist talk and reading about Writing the River Rising as part of Adelaide Festival special event Floods of Fire: Our Voices, Our Dreams.

Floods of Fire: Our Voices, Our Dreams 
FREE || The University of Adelaide
Sat 16 March, 2pm – 6pm

Credits

Writing the River Rising is an interactive digital writing project conceived by Alysha Herrmann and commissioned by Country Arts SA with support from the Government of South Australia through Arts South Australia. The Sandpit team have designed and built the digital interface and backend to bring to life Alysha’s vision. Alysha would like to thank all of the team at Sandpit and Country Arts SA, and a special thank you to friend and collaborator Daniel Giles for creating the illustrations in response to Alysha’s concept and writing.