Walter, Lotte Geeven

Walter is “a machine that translates the states of the sea into spoken language”. It was made by multimedia artist Lotte Geeven in collaboration with Thomas Grill.

The book creates a collection of words, set in the Monotype Grotesque, in reaction to the sea’s shifting conditions; peaceful texts when the sea was calm, illuminated by daylight, while a treacherous sea spoke of terror and loss, during episodes of darkness. Walter the publication collects those phrases; its column structure decreases at its end, as words increase in ‘heaviness’ and therefore become larger. Walter ends with an index of the three axes — x, y, z — which combine to create the many “moods” of the shifting North Sea.