Digitizing Water

The installation “The Numeralization of Water” represents a pyramid of vessels working as a system of “self-calculation” and “self-discipline” of water. Water drops from the big vessel on the top through pyramid down to vessels at the bottom. The eight vessels in the bottom row have magnet-operated contacts, which register the amount of water. The data is transformed into a stream of bits.These numeri­ cal data can be displayed on the computer monitor, printed out, as well as serve as a source for digitally generated music.
So states as “to be natural object” or “to be organism” have a source of their meanings in mental con­structions. But the installation is the machine which makes evident not this conventional character of “nature’s order”. Instead of criticism of knowledge “The Numeralization of Water” shows positive process of transformations natural body of Water to digital body which has the form of production of numerical data. It looks like a scientific experiment opening new horizons of passion to nature. Artificial but captured from within – produced as its own by its own energy – language for describing water is the result and the evidence of expressive and senses-caught process of human desire of wonder which met desire of water to be calculate. Of course it is a trick. But numerical voice of water is not the results of intellectually reduced mathematical descriptions of physical or natural science. The date of Water doesn’t become a part of knowledge.Water receives no features of organism.
As a result one of the basic natural elements – Water – became a part of text-produced machine (like its soul or source of existence) and receives an additional body by on one hand passing through special technical construction, on another – through opportunity to create cultural text about itself. This artificial body is both mechanical and digital saving also initially natural character of its material structure. It means that Water is finding its own voice among different things of contemporary human experience and culture. At the same time this voice is granted by human desire and inventiveness. But water (as any other natural element or artificial object) in order to find a voice has a need to enrich its initial body. For the body (water and others) the process of enrichment means process of overcoming its own, natural, initial state in the form of thing in itself.

Marina Sokolovskaya