Source2Sea: Bartók 3.0 Connectivity

The project begins from a simple premise: water connects springs, lakes, wetlands, rivers, estuaries, seas, and oceans, but the knowledge systems, institutions, cultural narratives, and responsibilities associated with them are often fragmented. Source2Sea therefore approaches connectivity not only as a hydrological and ecological process, but also as a cultural, educational, social, and ethical continuum. It asks how decisions and relationships formed around inland waters ultimately shape river basins, coastal environments, and ocean futures.

The project’s Bartók 3.0 methodology is inspired by Béla Bartók’s practice of deep listening, field-based encounter, intercultural comparison, and creative transformation. It is not a search for cultural purity, nor does it treat communities as passive sources of information. Instead, living sources are understood as points of encounter where people, places, waters, memories, practices, and scientific knowledge meet. Communities and knowledge holders are engaged as co-interpreters, co-educators, and, where appropriate, co-authors of the knowledge and tools developed.

Source2Sea combines field observation, embodied and sensory water experience, oral history, community storytelling, cultural and natural heritage interpretation, artistic practice, ecological research, participatory mapping, education, and foresight. The project describes this capacity to work responsibly across different forms of experience and knowledge as intermodal fluency and domain literacy. Rather than privileging either analogue or digital methods, it seeks to understand what each mode and discipline can reveal, what it may overlook, and how they can be brought into meaningful dialogue without reducing one to another.

Digital modelling and artificial intelligence are introduced where they can deepen, connect, and responsibly extend field-grounded understanding. An AI-supported Source2Sea Companion is envisaged not as an authority replacing human judgement, but as a multilingual interface to curated, contextualised, and progressively validated knowledge. It may support learning, reflection, cross-disciplinary dialogue, participatory foresight, and more informed forms of water stewardship.

The Tihany living laboratory

The project’s first living laboratory and demonstration node is being developed in Tihany, on the Lake Balaton peninsula in Hungary. Through fieldwork and engagement with local scientific, cultural, educational, environmental, and community actors, the pilot explores Tihany as a layered water landscape in which geology, hydrology, biodiversity, built and living heritage, livelihoods, spiritual and cultural traditions, artistic interpretation, community memory, and personal water experience are closely interconnected.

Centred around Belső-tó and the wider peninsula, the pilot brings together guided field immersion, attentive walking and listening, conversations with local knowledge holders, ecological observation, community storytelling, participatory mapping, and artistic and educational creation. It is evolving towards an open-air community water museum and Water Lab: not a conventional museum confined to a building, but a distributed learning and interpretation environment in which the landscape, its communities, institutions, stories, and ecological processes become interconnected sources of knowledge.

Knowledge emerging from the field process is not treated simply as data to be extracted. It is interpreted in context, discussed with relevant participants and specialists, progressively validated, and returned to the learning community. Selected materials may then inform educational resources, a curated knowledge environment, and the future Source2Sea Companion.

Although Tihany is an inland location, it forms part of the Lake Balaton–Sió–Danube–Black Sea continuum. This makes it a particularly valuable Ocean Decade pilot: it allows the project to explore how inland water heritage, everyday practices, ecological processes, and local decisions are connected to downstream, coastal, and marine futures. It demonstrates that meaningful ocean literacy must include the full watershed and the communities living far upstream from the sea.

Wider development and impact

Tihany provides a grounded methodology that can be adapted with, rather than mechanically transferred to, future partner locations in other river basins, coastal regions, and cultural contexts. Potential future nodes in Europe, Asia, and Africa will enable comparative learning while ensuring that each implementation begins with its own places, communities, ecological conditions, knowledge traditions, and priorities.

Through this growing constellation of place-based nodes, Source2Sea seeks to strengthen:

• water and ocean literacy across the entire watershed;
• intergenerational and cross-disciplinary learning;
• community participation and water stewardship;
• cultural and narrative sovereignty;
• responsible cooperation between scientific, experiential, artistic, and local knowledge;
• ethical and context-sensitive uses of AI;
• regenerative relationships between people, inland waters, rivers, coasts, and the ocean.

Source2Sea contributes to the Ocean Decade by reconnecting science and society across the source-to-sea continuum and by demonstrating that sustainable ocean futures begin far upstream—in the places where water is first lived, remembered, interpreted, shared, and cared for.