Alan Powell’s videos often blend elements of nature and everyday life with the latest in electronic imaging and recording equipment and techniques. Hydroglyphs (“water-writing”) is another video landscape painting by Powell in collaboration with Laurie McDonald, a fellow Electron Movers founder. The cutting edge technology of 1975, utilized to create Hydroglyphs, was the dual use of two image processors to align color to grayscale, synchronizing the colorization and simulating in video the sun glitter and dancing optical illusion created when water waves reflect light. This technique would be used to similar dynamic visual effect by Powell in 1977 with Beavertail Point,. On filming water—returned to again and again throughout Powell’s fifty-year career—Powell said in 2025: “I was always getting interesting abstract images from water,” the equivalent of what he and McDonald could generate electronically, but prettier; more organic and playful. Laurie McDonald on the synthesizer provides the music featured in Hydroglyphs, and those are Powell’s arms doing the canoeing. Both artists worked on the image processing.