progress: half empty/half full

This week I transitioned into working a bit on some pieces related to the fountain animation.

I'm using images from my trip to the Eel and creating non-linear, open-ended, short, narrative texts to pair with them. The texts combine fiction with reality, auto-biography with documentation, subjective with objective, history with interpretation, assumptions with facts. The idea is to present a more full and complicated story of the river, one that is not from one perspective but from many, one that includes contradictions as these occur naturally with people's varying perspective on the river, its history and its future. I don't want the text to be didactic because the situation isn't so. I want narratives that allow the viewer/reader to project their own interpretations onto the situation.

You're damned if you do and your damned if you don't.
There is just not enough water to go around. There is not enough water to give every city as much as it wants or needs. Give to one city take away from another. Both places need the water.

Water is such a complicated and limited resource (as complicated as oil, if not more) and its distribution and redistribution are such charged personal and political matters.

I want two things that are irreconcilable.

I want an Owen's River and Owen's Lake and I want Los Angeles to be the crazy sprawling desert metropolis that it is and all that that has to offer me.

I want the Eel River to keep its waters and the steelhead trout and native salmon to flourish again, providing for the people who's families have depended on them for generations and I want to drink my wine from Marin that's watered by this redirected water.


I'm thinking of the concept of half empty/half full. For every issue there are two ways of looking at it.

I went to Humboldt and I saw the river and I thought 'this is a beautiful river' and it is. But it is also a ruined river. It is half empty/half full. It's not as bad as The Owen's River because it is still there. The Owen's is just a dry bed and will continue to be that way. But its worse than free-flowing rivers because 80 percent of its water is diverted south and its animals are all dying. Its half empty/half full. depending how you look at it.

Water travels hundreds of miles across the country, gets to LA and then is used in water fountains, spraying up into the air, added some imitation of nature to parks and schools. People like them, they are nice and calming. At the same time they are ridiculous in their waster. They are half empty/half full.

discovered some new material

browsing through Bookforum today I noticed two books, each on one of the main topics I am dealing with in my work right now.

The first one:

desc: Writers and artists offer new perspectives on water, with writings and projects that touch on subjects ranging from new water infrastructures to the bliss of bathing.

The second:


desc: What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in belonging.

Now to find them...

Sometimes, walking home, I like to imagine that I'm still in San Francisco and sometimes I believe it.

Fall air and ambulance sounds remind me a lot of when I first moved to Long Beach.

lynda

just watched an hour and a half worth of tutorials on preparing to print and learned nothing new. : (

first draft

working on getting it to resemble the actual fountain. having a difficult time creating fluid movements with dirt.

any suggestions?

really odd mulholland fountain tribute video

Mulholland Memorial Fountain from Brian Lowe on Vimeo.