Water Futures Exhibition

Sound acts as a bridge between earth, voice, and memory. Asgary buries the end of a large black agricultural water tube into the sand of an industrial gravel lot and vocalizes lamentations into the earth. Donning headphones, she performs attuned to the echo that resonates from the sand of this staged “desert.” The video performance is augmented by audio recordings of melting snow over a day into a few minutes. In using sonics to reveal environmental events, Asgary imagines and records the grief of climate collapse. The Ad Hoc Collective for Improvising Mourning Technologies for Future Griefs is an ongoing collaborative performance project between Abou Farman and Asgary. It includes contributions from Julie Ezelle Patton and filmmaker Shelby Zoe Coley. Asgary builds upon prior performances in this video iteration using tubes as oral sound-transmitting devices. The composition is created from her voice as heard through the tubes, both near and far. The snow audio is recorded with the support of a MASS MoCA residency.

Sewers hold everything we want evicted from public life. But what we send into the depths below is not gone, only hidden. What stories do we hear when we let ourselves face evidence of past life? An array of handmade microphones have been connected to the water pipes in this building. They summon an orchestra of discarded sounds—tapes, home video, shellac records. Water waste discarded conjures sonic waste rediscovered.

"Balseros" honors the ocean as a living ancestral force shaped by displacement, disappearance, and reverence. Archival images of refugees fleeing Cuba on rafts are handwoven with fishing line on the TC2 computer-assisted loom, emerging or vanishing as light shifts, inviting viewers to search for them and witness the ocean’s haunting beauty and memory. Invoking Yemaya and Olokun during the weaving transformed the loom into a ceremonial tool, a vessel for prayers and political traumas.

Stillness and movement are two defining qualities of the ocean. They coexist in the depth of its sounds and across the surface of its waters. Oceans know no boundaries. Yet their vastness is always shaped by the limits of land. "On and Off Shore" invites visitors to experience the tuned frequencies of underwater life and to move, between still image and motion, toward an encounter with the vastness and depth of the waters that surround us. Projection was paired with sound recordings of underwater life, captured in Monterey Bay.

Concerto in Glacial Time is a generative audio-visual installation exploring water across geological timescales. Glacier sounds become the soloist, accompanied by ever-evolving cello lines. Interact with the touchscreen to play the glacier-sounds granular synth and change the visuals. Credits: Field recordings from ancient glacial air bubbles being released (H. Lentfer, NPS), Field recordings of glacier cracking (BBC), Cello recorded loops (by artist), Video footage (by artist) of rocky shoreline and waves in his hometown Jamestown, RI, processed via analog video synth techniques with Hydra video synth.

A fourteen-second loop moves between mottled sunlight on water and electronic static. The CRT monitor, already antiquated, highlights our dreamlike memories of waves alongside the noise that threatens to erase them. The brevity of the loop denies contemplative distance, and insists on a more active relation between our pasts and possible futures. Will we watch something precious degrade and reform over and over again, or will we recapture our own attention as the infrastructure of care?

The Resolution of Water is an interactive light lens magnifying human impact on a closed water system. With your interaction, the piece projects the immediate chaos and rhythmic return to stillness, embodying the dual meaning of "resolution": visual clarity and the labor of recovery. What is the resolution of water? It's a critical meditation for "Water Futures," asking: when we or nature disrupts our precious resource, are we prepared for the duration of its equilibrium?

Cryoscape began during Jiabao Li's Arctic Circle Artist Residency in Svalbard, inspired by water’s diverse forms—vapor in the clouds, snowflakes in the sky, liquid waves in the ocean, and the solid majesty of glaciers and sea ice. Each state reveals a distinct morphology, reminding us that we are connected through bodies of water. This encounter led to the creation of a 3D ice printer that captures ice formation while treating melting as a core aesthetic element. The printer produces forms across scales, from lunar terrain and snowy landscapes to microscopic crystals and sculptural references. A camera records the ice in real time, while an AI system translates these images into Haiku-inspired poems. Here, AI acts as a teacher. It invites us to see vast natural processes through a tabletop ice printer. Melting is the message. Unlike traditional sculpture, Cryoscape exists in constant transformation. As the work travels, local humidity, temperature, air quality, and water calcium reshape each ice formation, making every iteration site-specific and co-created with its environment. Each AI-generated poem carries an environmental cost, tied to the melting of a glacier. Cryoscape is a self-destroying machine.

Prompt Fountain– Slop Generator is an interactive fountain installation that exposes the hidden water consumption of AI data centers. Six ultrasonic sensors monitor a three-foot detection zone around a ceramic vessel, measuring viewer proximity in real-time. An Arduino microcontroller processes these measurements, converting human presence into proportional water flow. Closer proximity and multiple visitors trigger exponentially higher flow rates, mirroring how data centers scale cooling infrastructure with computational demand. The weathered ceramic form is adorned with soldered circuit boards, juxtaposing ancient vessels with contemporary technology. As viewers approach, LED indicators illuminate and water consumption increases, making tangible the invisible cost of AI interaction. Each ChatGPT conversation consumes approximately 500ml of water in server cooling. This fountain transforms abstract statistics into immediate, physical experience and implicates viewers in the environmental consequences of artificial intelligence.

'Flow' is a visual study of water moving through paper using only cuts, ink, and water. The hypnotic rhythm of liquid advancing through fiber offers meditative visual rest while making visible the invisible forces of capillary action and chromatic separation. As black ink dissolves into unexpected gradients, each fiber acts as a tiny channel, demonstrating how simple geometric constraints choreograph complex fluidic phenomena.

With the "Sacramento River Paradox" Niemeyer seeks to direct our attention to the awesome Sacramento River, which quenches the thirst of 1/3 of all California residents, grows their food, and washes their bodies. In a set of three images, Niemeyer visualizes the river's flow and water level throughout the Winter 2023 season. Flow and level are the result of snowmelt, temperature, wind and rainfall, connecting the most remote regions of California with the most densely populated urban centers. The images show this data through novel data visualizations. The left image in the triptych shows an AI forecast, the right image shows actual measurements, and the middle image shows the difference between the two.

Altar is a meditation on the cycles of water, labor, and growth. Surrounding a dried indigo plant, the quiet end of a lifecycle, are twelve panels of indigo-dyed fabric. Six shibori pieces represent the journey from seed to plant, a transformation that relies on the purity of water the artist used to grow the plants, extract the pigment, and dye the fiber. By touching your phone to the pestle, you are invited into a digital rain altar. Here, language is not preserved, but weathered as words fall, flicker, and dissolve into the depths, returning to the fluid state from which they emerged.

Fountain uses water as a conductive touch input, dripping onto an iPad screen to repeatedly wake a face on a website and disturb the device. The iPad stands for polished, standardized interface design that trains users into automatic gestures, reducing content awareness. By interrupting this loop, the work forces renewed attention, framing disruption as a small act of self-care.

Experience the effect a single droplet of water can have on a ray of light — a play of caustics, motion, and chance.

Experience the effect a single droplet can have on a ray of light—a play of caustics, motion, and chance. Sound by Héloïse Garry

The Space Palette Pro is a visual music instrument played by finger-painting on pressure-sensitive pads. As a “casual instrument” it is immediately accessible and immersive, with expressive depth that rewards creative exploration. No pre-recorded media, sequences, or loops are used - everything is generated in realtime by your hands.

A listening space in the gallery receives voices. When breath enters, a fountain stirs in a distant pond, its movement returning as light and sound. Breath becomes flow. Against a time when experience is flattened into screens and commands, the work turns toward the hydrocommons—water as shared, relational, and unowned—where speaking is not control, but a joining, and water answers in its own way.