Moundains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In the mountains of truth, you will never climb in vain. – Henry David Thoreau
The heart of the mountains is like the heart of our existence. – Peter Matthiessen
I will not let my feet touch the ground until I have reached the summit. – Tenzing Norgay
The mountains are calling, and I must go. – John Muir
Nestled in the Western Himalaya, the Parvati valley emerges where the Pir Panjal and Great Himalayan ranges converge. Here the valley splits the Kullu Mountains like a deep gash, its formation guided by tectonic faults where one mountain chain thrust over another, and carved by millenia of glacial ice and rushing waters. At dawn, when the first light catches the snow-draped peaks of Deo Tibba and Pin Parvati, the valley transforms into a natural amphitheater of light and shadow. The valley reveals its dramatic geologic heritage - where metamorphic gneisses of the Greater Himalayas meet the younger rocks of the Pir Panjal. The river below, named after the goddess Parvati, has carved her course along structural weaknesses, tumbling through narrow gorges and over worn boulders, its jade waters carrying both glacial slit and stories of the mountains; violent uplift.
This landscape, where thermal springs burst from deep tectonic faults and cannabis grows wild on abandoned terraces among other native bushes, represents the complex interplay of geological forces, ecological adaptations, and human aspirations that characterizes the entire Himalayan range. Modern man must have set foot in the Himalaya before 10,000 years ago. Over the millinea they settled all habitable corners of Earth’s tallest mountain ranges. The Himalaya suffered human presence, with deforestration turning the Tibetan plateau to a cold desert. However, human expansion was always limited by the extreme unpredictability of Himalayan weather and geology. Until we arrive in the modern age.
Today, as motorable roads reach deep, hydroelectric prjects dam the sacred waters and concrete structures replace traditional timber homes, the valley embodies a crucial question: how do we reconcile our need to experience, understand and document these mountains with our impact upon them? Despite the sublime experiences they inspire in an individual, modern humanity’s common-market-interest has been nothing but catastrophic for the mountains, and the beings that used to thrive there.
What does that mean if we travel through the mountains today? What shall we experience? What will inspire us? There are several methods to measure the mountains, depending on what you are modeling. Modeling them on a computer is how we will try to understand them. Inspiration is endless: we will source from Himalayan geology, hydrology, meteorology, climatology, biology, and anthropology. However, our real interest will be in the methods of inquiry themselves. What science and technology will we need to learn and implement? And, to grow our own personal underestanding of these magestic mountains. And we will travel, providing us with ample examples to inspire creation of learning material in the form of computational notebooks, interactive webpages, and infographics.
We seek to capture not just the mechanics but the music of the mountains - from the crystalline patterns in their stones to the rhythmic cycles of their ecosystems. Through computational art and scientific modeling, we aim to express how life, from the smallest lichen to hum an settlements, is inseperable from each other and mountain geology, hydrology, and climate. We are interested in shapes and rhythms of both the natural and imagined worlds. To reconstruct and simulate mountain systems we will develop an approach that has recently been used to develop digital twins of brain circuits (TODO add references). The goal is not scientific / research / commercial software. We have to remember that computer programs are our way of understanding, and our real goal is to develop a personal understanding of the Himalaya. So a working application would become necessary if were to succeed in our goal.
When we work on this project, let us make sure to appreciate the sublime that the Himalaya inspires in us. Let us develop a personal expression of their sheer beauty using computationally generated art. We want to capture the colorful patterns of their stones, streams, and snows, and the rhythms of their flora and fauna. Using their stark example, we want to express in code, and in art, how life is inseparable from air, land, and water. We want to show how biology responds to geological challenges. We want to show how human imagination adapts to a towering geography. I want to show how mankind has become a mightier force than terrestrial geology. We will need modeling and data analyses - and also art to express their beauty, and how it’s loss will diminish vastly human experience on planet Earth.
How have the Himalaya experienced 20,000 years of human presence? It is not possible to capture in a few phrases, especially what that is going on there in our current times. While the ancients praised the Himalaya as bode of Gids, today man has rivaled God in power that transforms the face of a living planet. High mountain ridges, and rivers running down valleys, that may have inspired a poet’s mind to sing about Shiva’s hair, are today filled by industrial consumerist filth. Snow is no longer forbidden. Instead commercial interests see the snow as a resource to create energy or even sell it as bottled water. They want to make profits as long as the snow melts. Soon there will be no snow left, and they seem unaware. Thousand temples in the clouds have materialized as progressives’ temples to the scientific world, the dams that have ruined the mountains’ hydro-logical flow, effecting forests and local people’s livelihoods. The science that the British surveyors used have been developed into templates of exploitation of the heights that were, only a century ago, forbidden. For millenia people have seeked inspiration and wisdom in the mountains’ forbidding solitude. Today on a trip in the mountains we learn of how to destroy beauty. The air is thickening each day, and the borders are realized with mighty enemy armies face-to-face ready to annihilate each other, with no concern of these ecosystems’ fragility. Ghost cats wondered in the mountains yesterday, but tomorrow they will wander only in stories. The Himalaya inspired poetic narratives over the ages of the past, but over the ages of the future they will inspire epics human folly.
We attempt to weave together several threads: the ecological urgency facing Himalaya, a computational understanding of mountain systems, creation of art that captures sublime experience, and documentation of a living landscape before it transforms irrevocably.
At heart, this project will be about developing a computational environment/system/medium/framework/domain-language for expression our relationship with mountains - one that can simultaneously serve scientific understanding, artistic expression, and environmental witness.
We will embrace an iterative, exploratory approach rather than rigid planning. Each journey - physical or computational - will reveal new questions. The knowledge grows organically. The art emerges from the data as we handle it.
We will have essentially two distinct but entangled phases: Reconstruction & Simulation (Scientific Modeling) and Expression (Computational Art).
- Reconstruction & Simulation
- We want to build a digital twin of the Himalaya, one valley at a time, starting with the Parvati valley. This will not be just a static 3D map, but a dynamic system simulation incorporating geological history, hydrology, and ecology.
- Expression
- We aim to process this data to create art. We will translate the mechanics of fluid flows, and erosion rates into the music of visual patterns and generative soundscapes.
We are not proposing a single tool, but rather cultivating a computational ecosystem - a digital garden where science, art, and personal pilgrimage, intertwined. The key will be to approach it as a modular incremental exploration, not a monolithic application.
We are seeking to document and understand the mountains from the perspective of a single human animal, deliberately stepping away from anthropocentric metrics of progress or conservation. The journey itself is exploratory - both physically and intellectually. The methodological framework will emerge organically rather than being pre-defined.
Computational Frameworks We May Develop
Topographical Pattern Recognition : Capturing the structural signatures of glacial carving, tectonic uplift, and erosion patterns.
Ecological Rhythm Modeling : Translating seasonal changes, daily light patterns, and biological cycles into computational simulations.
Geological Biological Interface Analysis : Examining how life adapts to and transforms mountain geology.
Temporal Visualization Systems : Representing geological time scales alongside human and ecological timeframes.
Earth Observation
We may think of working in our proposed computational environment as an exercise on earth observation. Observation is not only about taking the equivalent of a photograph. When we observe Earth, we discover how her dynamic and complex environment results from interconnected components, processes, and cycles. These systems interact across multiple scales of space and time to create the conditions that support life on Earth. This means an immense amount of data. Silo-ing it is not enough. Producing automated standardized reports is also not enough.
To scientifically and truly observe the planet Earth, we also need to make sense of this data. There is an immense amount of quantitative information available in such photographs of the Earth worth billions of dollars of commercial value. There is data with information that if processed could save lives, not only during the next stormy season but decades and centuries down the climatically unsteady regime that this planet has now entered. In this data there is also information that can be transformed into artistic beauty. We want to emphasize the personal in scientific and artistic discovery, and so need this computational environment.
Reconstructing an Observable Model World
Using an ideal digital reconstruction, we should be able to reconstruct a statistical instance of any observation that we could make in a real landscape. Having only limited resources we will focus on watching them. We can use a simple model for the observing-eye, representing it as a point in 3D space, and recording images with a camera located there. Our digital twin will not be the visualization, but an actual statistical instance of an entire geographical region. The reconstruction does not have to be complete, and we can generate the world as required by a mobile observing-eye.
We will need several independent components. At the core, we need to represent a landscape’s physical and biological components both on land and in sky. To instantiate a landscape then, we will generate the landscape’s elements following statistical laws as provided in a configuration. We have experience working with traditionally statistical and mechanical laws that govern natural anatomy — knowledge and skills that we will need to update with the latest in generative AI. Can our computational enviroment’s agents help us?
An Artistic Observing Eye
We will develop an artistic view of our work in this project. We will develop computational art as a tool for understanding. The process of abstracting natural forms, colors, and patterns into computational art is not just an output; it’s a method of deep observation and analysis. When we try to capture the “essence” of a river valley’s colors or the fractal nature of a mountain range in an algorithm, we are forced to understand it more profoundly. Our art can become a visual hypothesis or a summary of our current understanding.