Water

Context

Oriental Techno Club ran an installation each month, one per element
of the Wuxing. I mapped projection onto those and built
the material for each night — that work is on the OTC Live page.

This one is the piece I built myself.

1 / What it had to do

The night for the water element needed something in the room,
in the space which is called Crypta and is located on -1 floor.
It had to be water in a dark space under the ground with no
water in it. The room was also not a classic gallery.
I wanted to create something that could allow visitors to be
part of the work and interact with it, flow in-between water-like
material.

2 / The idea

Depth instead of surface. Water is not a picture of water — it is
the experience of looking through something you can see
through and still cannot see clearly through. Layers
of transparent material hung with gaps between them do
that with no water at all: you are looking through several
sheets at once, everything behind goes soft, and if you step
between them you stop being a viewer and start being inside it.

3 / How it works

Transparent sheets hung in layers with space left between
them, so the piece has depth rather than being a screen
with a picture on it. People could walk in and be surrounded
on more than one side. A TouchDesigner animation ran
abstract material with quotes appearing and disappearing,
which the layers pull apart — the same text sits at different
distances from you depending on which sheet it lands on,
and it resolves and dissolves as you move.