The Life of a River is a datasculpture that visualizes the monthly water heights of the Loire River in Orléans from 2000 to 2022, transforming hydrological data into a tangible, layered wooden form.

Each disc in the sculpture represents a year, with stacked shapes reflecting seasonal fluctuations, highlighting the river’s extreme variations between winter floods and summer lows. Instead of mapping geography from above, the work focuses on the rhythm and dynamics of the river itself.

Developed as a prototype using CNC-milled wood, this datasculpture addresses both aesthetic and practical challenges of representing continuous environmental data physically. It captures the complexity of the Loire’s flow without relying on traditional maps, revealing patterns and anomalies across two decades.

The project emerged from collaborations and discussions with geologists, who highlighted the difficulty of visualizing regular river flows beyond exceptional events. Anne-Laure’s approach gives form to subtle variations often overlooked in traditional hydrological representations.

While the sculpture remains a prototype, it illustrates the potential of datasculpture to explore environmental and temporal patterns in physical form. Future iterations may experiment with new materials and forms to further capture the river’s behavior.

Explore the project and see how water data can be transformed into a tactile and visual experience that conveys both scale and nuance of river flows over time.