‘Reparations’ (2004) by Michel de Broin. See the video here.
Empty plastic bottles found by chance on the streets of Paris are transformed into rockets. A bicycle pump is used to compress a mixture of water and air inside the bottle until the pressure is built up high enough to fire it into the sky.
‘The fountain of prosperity’ (2007) by Michael Stevenson
The Fountain of Prosperity (2007) is a reconstruction of the ‘Moniac’, a machine designed in the late 1940s by New Zealand economist Bill Phillips to illustrate the concept of monetary flow in national economies. A fixed volume of red-dyed water, representing money, is pumped through a system of transparent tubes and sluices into clear chambers representing factors such as ‘surplus balances’ and ‘International Monetary Funds’. Regarded as an extremely developed tool for analysing economic functions, 15 of these devices were built and shipped around the world. Stevenson discovered that one of the machines was acquired by the Central Bank of Guatemala in 1952, and has imagined what it might look like today. His replica is corroding and leaking, and the chamber marked ‘held balances’ is empty, suggesting that the economic model it represents is on the verge of collapse.
Read more about the project here.
‘World Community Grid Water Features’ by AIDS-3D
A group of spectacular cast-fiberglass fountains stand together on an elevated server-room floor. A Fit PC 2 (the smallest PC currently available, 96% more energy efficient than a standard desktop) is installed in each water feature. Whenever the fountains are plugged in, the Linux PC’s will automatically boot up and run World Community Grid software, a distributed computing project which uses a massive network of PC’s around the world to model solutions for various humanitarian problems, such as: “Clean Energy Project”, “Influenza Antiviral Drug Search”, “ Fight Aids@home” and “Nutritious Rice for the World”. The delightful splashing of the water and twinkle of the energy-efficient LED’s act as relaxing and meditative status-light for the computers, tirelessly laboring within. Although there is no screen visible in the installation, the computation progress can be remotely monitored through a dedicated website.
Oscar Muñoz, ‘Re-Trato’ (2003)
A video of Muñoz painting a portrait in water on a hot stone over and over, while it evaporates and vanishes.
Talking about creative blocks… Hennesy Youngman on Bruce Nauman.
If you need to know more about Post-structuralism, click to see Hennesy explain it.
Helmut Dick‘s ‘Salad-field as big as a skyscraper’ (2001)
The field was situated in Gropiusstadt, Berlin-Neukölln, one of the biggest skyscraper settlements in Germany. The crops were gathered by neighborhood residents.
‘Le monde érotique’ (1998) by Pierre Joseph
An attempt to recreate the map of the world by memory. via
Last Saturday the art-/soccer-event Polder Cup was held in the ‘polders’ of Ottoland, near Rotterdam. Ottoland was an open event conceived by Spanish artist Maider Lopez, on invitation of Witte de With and SKOR.
Polder Cup was a soccer tournament in the middle of the polders of Ottoland, which meant that the (bumpy) field was crossed by trenches with water that the players were not allowed to cross. This made the game a little more unpredictable than usual.
It was a nice day, reminiscing of high school sporting day events and village-parties…
