Literally: The shape of water
January 29th, 2007 by herinde
On the topic of the many shapes of water I remembered a couple of digital projects attempting to literally manipulate the shape of water.
The project “Bitfall” (top image) creates temporary physical water sculptures in mid-air. It’s a kind of giant vertical matrix printer consisting of a number of synchronized valves spurting out ephemeral imagery. The images only exist for a very short while until gravity eventually wins. There’s a video here.
A Danish project in the same vein: “Regntid” was supposed to be a secluded space with rain pouring down - except where a person stood. The installation would track your movements and simply stop the rain above you. I’m not sure they really got it up and running (the version I saw at Halfmachine was not as technically sophisticated). Anyway, it’s a nice thought to be able to find your very own path through the rain.
4 Responses to “Literally: The shape of water”
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This is extremely fascinating… and triggers a new brainwave from the land of comics and popculture…
In our summer house we have quite a selection of old Donald Duck-comic-books - collected by my uncle when he was a child and the comicstrips were just becoming popular. There is this fantastic story about Donald Duck who is a ‘rainmaker’. With a very fancy little airplane he shapes the clouds so that they will only rain directly on the dry fields, and everyone else can enjoy the sunshine. He punches holes in the clouds to keep the laundry dry and he makes fantastic ‘cloud-commercials’ in the sky shaping the clouds into typewriters and payoffs…
He’s very succesful and making quite a business doing so. But in the end - of course - everything goes wrong…the morale being that one shouldn’t mess with nature.
Whenever my family and I are caught in the rain or notice that it’s raining heavily nearby, but we’re all dry, we always refer to that Donald Duck-story. Across the generations :-)
Oh! And in one of the volumes of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, there is the story of a guy, upon whom it always, always rains. He is terribly depressed, poor guy, but the explanation for al this raining (so the narrator tells us) is in fact that this particular person is the Rain Gods’ favourite. They love him, and shower him (literally) with the best thing they have to give: Rain!
This is something I like to think about when in a shower! It is also, I believe, a good illustration how being loved by someone can be a burden.
The ‘Bitfall’ video, by the way, is breathtaking!
I don’t remember that particular Donald Duck story, Nadja, but it reminds me of the Japanese computer game “Cloud” (http://www.thatcloudgame.com). If you feel like flying around shaping clouds you might want to try it.
The game also has a similar “don’t mess with nature” moral, because one of the goals is to stop the pollution from the bad factories. Opposite good old Donald, the cloud-shaping seems to be a kind of antidote to this. It does, however, get a bit boring after a while.
Regarding Bitfall, there’s another video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EajU1WrEWjg).
Oh…but the Donald-story is very old…back from the 1950′ies, so no wonder that you haven’t read it :-)
I’ll check out the game - sounds great.