Hellegat

Why I made this

I am a lifelong New Yorker and have lived steps from the East River for over 20 years. One day while I was coding a different project, I moved the hair from my face, and my wind-up watch, (an old mid-century Junghans I had recently purchased), came close to my ear, and I heard its tick for the first time. It was such a wonderful sound. I was struck by how there had been something happening so close to me, that I was only made aware of by chance. As I thought about this sudden feeling of serendipity, this sudden discovery of something beautiful that was there all along, my thoughts turned to the river. I wanted to connect this moment of discovery, with my beloved river and present it in the most "live" manner as possible.

Hell Gate is a spot on the East River between Astoria and Wards Island so dangerous and difficult to avoid, that a ton of time and money was spent blowing up rocks in order to increase its safety. "Hell Gate" is a simplified translation from the Dutch Hellegat. I chose its Dutch translation for the project name, to divest it a bit from its tragic past and its hellish connotations. It turns out, Hellegat can be translated as 'Bright Passage', or 'Hell Hole'. I hope this spot on the internet feels more like the former.

How it works

The tide from the Atlantic takes two paths around Long Island. I added an animation so you can see how it happens. Above the animation are the numbers coming in from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that show what is actually happening in the river. That time between one side's lead running out, and the other rising and changing the direction of the current, that pause, is called Slack Water. Mariners would wait for this calm to pass safely. The motion of this ebb and flow is like the river breathing. The pause in between each breath, the Slack Water, I decided would be the magical time when the viewer can experience discovering something previously unseen. An image that was there all along, waiting in the stacks of the Public Library. During Slack Water, an image arises, chosen by the river.

As an artist, I tend to draw from images rather than my imagination, so I am always looking for old books at flea markets, and libraries, or surfing the internet for inspiring images. Again, that feeling of discovering something, especially something old that has been around and re-discovered by me is such a thrill. I decided to bring that into the project as the actual thing and feeling that the river would deliver.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) has over 430,000 images in the public domain that are available for use. I wanted to use this treasure trove to represent the unseen object that surfaces from the depths. The program takes NOAA's actual and predicted numbers and puts the gap between them through a hash (a mathematical function used to transform data into a fixed size number). In short, the hash creates a random number that represents a place in the NYPL Public Domain Collection and pulls it up for us.

I hope that the image that surfaces inspires you to make art or sends you down a historical rabbit hole, or just makes you feel connected to something larger than yourself.

Who I am

My name is Maria, I am an artist in NYC. I like to create with pen and ink, woodworking, book making, and code. I started out as a backend developer and have worked on many software projects as a coder, project manager and user researcher. Still, I am someone that is not good at math. I admire those that are and I love looking at and trying to understand, technical mathematical things. In my heart, I am not just an artist but an engineer. To help me be able to achieve my coding visions, I use Anthropic's Claude model Opus 5.5. Claude wrote most of the code, but I designed how it works, walked through it line by line, checked against my own understanding, pushed back on the parts I felt could be clearer, and wrote some of the seed code myself. The vision and the words are mine, grammar be damned. You can see my other works here.