'petite pluie
verticale
qui larmoie,
tisse de l'eau,
faufile l'air,
hérisse
d'aiguilles
les canaux
planes'
How can we use the temporality .. the structural differentiation .. of water cartographies in a city like Amsterdam?
'Process-based, transformative and transductive elemental states, particularly in the form (or formlessness) of emissions such as sweat, gas, air, steam, breath and smoke.'
'The instance of connection between Zurich and 'now', or Zurich, 'now' and our projection to Amsterdam (and beyond) is an example of tending to ways of making this anarchival collective memory felt in its transductional relations.'
'How we can activate (not just represent) these processes live, and make felt the fabrics/membranes that enable these fluid ecological systems to connect body and environment via often very fragile and temporary tissues/channels ...
Too often these membranous processes are thought to be 'invisible' or 'immaterial' due to their ephemeral and osmotic nature, and yet, they have profound affective and material effects on both body and environment.'
PSi: Fluid States
'How can we activate the complex ecology between water cycles ('natural' and industrial...), urban infrastructure(s) and body systems (explorable on a micro level to include the digestive, respiratory, circulatory, lymphatic, urinary and nervous systems?'
How do techniques of mapping water (and flood lines) suggest different movements for activating urban topographies?
'The city I live in (York) floods all of the time, parts of the city just disappear, the city tries to mark (for posterity) the highest water lines of flooding.'
Janine Antoni
Touch, 2002
Video installation
Edition of 5 with 2 artist's proofs
132 X 178 inches (335.28 X 452.12 cm)
Duration: 9.37 minute loop
How do water rhythms hold time? What kinds of processes, changes of state, techniques, membranes, intercessors or immediators make water rhythms felt?
Waving (moving energy oscillates through water's substance, breaking the surface at regular peaks - reaching upwards and outwards)
Rippling (on the surface of still water, competing ripples deform and restore under the pressure of wind - gently dimpling)
Sinking (becoming submerged, in the depth of an enveloping, homogenous coating, pulled with an anchor or held down with gravity - subsiding solidity)
Seeping (fluid finding porosity, porous membranes ooze, exude, drip, dribble, discharge, excrete, leak, drain, bleed, sweat, leach, filter, percolate, permeate, soak, escape, breach - slow release)
Absorbing (into dirt, paper, fabric, skin ... aggregates filter through absorbent membranes, water expands paper, fabric or plant fibers, swelling and engrossing them, assimilating substance and surface in hybrid retention - buffering and consuming difference)
Evaporating (the surface of liquid lifts into air, the substantive density of liquid fades into a less compressed state of suspended dispersion, into vapor. Once liquid is fully evaporated, dry, non-soluble liquid contaminates are deposited into an even, residual film - susceptible exposing)
Condensating (vapor returns to liquid, compressed to its saturation limit through differential pressures and temperatures or by coming into contact with liquid or solid surfaces - returning density at the surface)
Freezing (water molecules expand into crystals, end on end, holding solid cold, releasing latent heat, releasing pressure, equalizing solidity - in dormant wait of energy)
Flowing (a traversing line of contour, smooth, continuous, unbroken, transporting, circulating - conjoining movements in rhythm)
'All my ships are white,' said Rhoda. 'I do not want red petals of hollyhocks or geranium. I want white petals that float when I tip the basin up. I have a fleet now swimming from shore to shore ... I have picked all the fallen petals and made them swim. I have put raindrops in some. I will plant a lighthouse here, a head of Sweet Alice. And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers . . .'
