Given my penchant for art installations that spatially actuate remote geographic data in (near) real-time—such as torch fountains that broadcast antipodean sunlight, plazas that quiver earthquakes half a continent away, and quaint water features on city centers that mimic the fluctuating water levels of peripheral reservoirs—I couldn't help but quickly add David Bowen's Tele-Present Water to the archives.
In that new piece, seen in the video above installed at The National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland, a mechanical grid structure is turned into a facsimile of a tiny patch of the Pacific Ocean, specifically the area around NOAA's data buoy Station 46246 at 49°59’7″ N 145°5’20″ W. As goes the patch, so goes the grid. It's a mixing of here and there that I can't resist likening to the instantaneous detection and conversion of catastrophic natural disasters, from tsunamis to volcanic eruptions to floods, into globally televised events.
In any case, why not also reverse the scenario? As museum visitors play around with the grid, the distant buoy simultaneously warps and heaves the surrounding water accordingly, for an audience of about zero.
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