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.