Moving a River Online
I studied theater and art. I’ve spent most of my career building websites. Those two parts of my life don’t often meet. There Must Be Other Names for the River is one project where they did.
The piece
There Must Be Other Names for the River is a sound work by artists Marisa Demarco, Dylan McLaughlin and Jessica Zeglin. They took streamflow data from six points on the Rio Grande, from 1974 to now, and turned it into a score. Six singers each voice one point on the river. When the river runs high, the voice is full. When it runs dry, the voice drops away.
It premiered live at the UNM Art Museum in April 2019. It was performed again at the National Hispanic Cultural Center that November. A physical installation was planned for fall 2020. Then the pandemic closed the museum.
The artists asked if the piece could live online. They wanted it simple and beautiful. My job was to figure out how.
What gets lost
A live performance does things a website can’t. The audience shares one room. Everyone hears the same thing at the same time. The singers breathe together. Online, every visitor is alone. They have different screens and different speakers, and they can leave whenever they want.
So the question wasn’t how to film the performance. It was how to give one person at a computer something close to standing in that room.
What we built
Each singer’s track plays at the same time, locked together. Visitors can mute any voice to hear one stretch of the river alone.
Jessica’s drawing of the river became the stage. As you scroll, a line travels down the river from the headwaters to the Gulf. Along the way, 36 moments from the river’s history appear. Circles at each of the six locations grow and shrink with the real flow data. A year counter runs from 1974 forward and keeps going past today.
Keeping it theirs
This was the artists’ work, not mine. We met every week and kept a shared notes doc. Jessica’s handwriting became the site’s font. I hand-drew the icons and controls to match her lines. Nothing on the screen should look like it came from a template.
The artists tested every version and pushed back. They asked for a draggable progress bar. They asked for data-driven circles, not just decoration. They wanted the tracks to start as you scrolled. Browsers don’t allow sound to start on a scroll, so we staged the voices to fade in one after another instead. It worked better than what we first planned.
The hardest problem came in the last week. Chrome and Safari block sound that doesn’t start from a click. We had six sounds and only one click. We rebuilt the start so one press of a play button starts all six voices.
Where theater came in
In theater, a designer serves the play. You make choices so the audience feels what the director wants them to feel. You don’t make choices to show off. That’s how I approached this site. I thought about what the visitor sees first, when the sound comes in, and when to stay out of the way. The staggered voices work like light cues. They build the room one piece at a time.
After launch
The site went live in spring 2021. The piece kept growing after that. In 2023, it became a mural and installation at SITE Santa Fe.
This project showed me that my art training and my tech work aren’t separate skills. Knowing how a performance works helped me decide what the code needed to do. Knowing the code helped me tell the artists what was possible.
You can experience the piece here. For the full build story, see the Mindshare Labs case study.