Creative Work

Lost Water! Remainscape?

Lost Water! Remainscape? (LWR) endeavours to represent the waterscape of past and present through its multifarious narrative components: text, hypertext, digital literary entities, videos and images. The player has to interact with the digital entities in order to read and play the LWR. The poetry in Tamil is written by Jagadeesh. The details in Tamil and English and the translation of Tamil poetry into English are written by Shanmugapriya, the author of the LWR. Our aim is to create cognizance about the environmental crisis and particularly about the water stress in South India. LWR is created in Blender, Adobe Animate CC, CSS, JQuery, HTML. It has four sections: Historical Map, 3D River, 3D Water tanks and Photo Animation. The first section Historical Map uses the 19th century British colonial India historical maps to visually portray the changes in the water tanks from British India Coimbatore to present. The white colour represents rivers, the red colour is disappeared tanks, and green colour is shrinking tanks. The second section 3D River embodies the flowing water, fish, butterflies and trees. It picturizes the beautiful river of Coimbatore once it had in the past. The animation revisits the past and the poetry arouses the emotions and reimagine the waterscape through both the rhetoric of visuals and words. The textual narrative offers some intriguing details about the rivers and tanks in the region. The third section 3D Water tank animation provides the historical information of water tanks that were built during the Karikala Chola period in the 9th century to store its surplus water, and to avoid flooding in the region and how this breath-taking engineering technique kept the ground water level high. The final section Photo animation displays the current condition of the water bodies alongside poetry and contextual information through bubbles.