Boetti and a collaborator spent seven years researching the lengths of rivers, determined to arrive at a convincingly accurate hierarchy despite the impossibility of absolute measurements. This work presents their findings in a straightforward list in descending order of length, giving no clue to the inexact and contradictory information underlying it.
A rain chain in winter; Dresden Kunsthof Passage; Drainage planters near Pike Place Market in Seattle.
If there is a larger takeaway here perhaps it is about paths of least resistance, with regards to both the actual flow of water and design decisions. On the one hand, it is easy to blindly follow regional precedents and traditions with long histories (or grab whatever is handy at the hardware store). On the other hand, sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and decide consciously how to reveal (or conceal) a natural process.
David Horvitz made the score ‘When the ocean sounds’ for human voices intended to mimic the sound of the sea.
...Imagine the first life forms, with porous skin or cell walls, through which the sea could freely flow into and out of their small bodies. At a certain moment, however, these life forms evolve. They come out of the sea and develop a different type of skin, one that allows them to keep liquids within their bodies. These liquids are ultimately seawater, and so the creatures – as do we – carry the sea with them, no matter where they go.
Medusa from A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast by Philip Henry Gosse, 1853.
Philip Henry Gosse’s Stunning 19th-Century Illustrations of Coastal Creatures and Reflections on the Delicate Kinship of Life
“These objects are, it is true, among the humblest of creatures that are endowed with organic life… Here we catch the first kindling of that spark, which glows into so noble a flame in the Aristotles, the Newtons, and the Miltons of our heaven-gazing race.”
website world = a vessel for holding water (bath, lake, pond, ocean, puddle, cup) / newsletters = moving water (river, streams, creeks, waterfalls) / creative flow = channels, weather-based (rainwater, storms, tsunami, waves) / the psyche = an infinite, consciousness-space that holds everything else
this metaphor feels so true to me because life, itself, is dependent on water as source. thus, creativity is a form of psychic water — sometimes materialized. these two truths I always knew.
but to extend the water-as-life and water-as-system metaphor to everything in our internet practice — is then to make even the act of sending a newsletter, or hitting “publish” on a post — contain the energy of that which is life-giving, essential, and sacred. in this model, everything is connected. I’ve decided that this is the way I want to be on the internet, and this is the kind of world I want to build.
Rain chains are a beautiful and functional alternative to traditional, closed gutter downspouts. Guiding rain water visibly down chains or cups from the roof to the ground, rain chains transform a plain gutter downspout into a pleasing water feature. From the soft tinkling of individual droplets to the soothing rush of white water, they are a treat to listen to.
Rain chains (‘kusari doi’ in Japanese) in concept are not a new idea. For hundreds of years, the Japanese have used the roof of their homes to collect water, transporting it downward with chains and finally depositing the rain water into large barrels for household water usage. Japanese temples often incorporate quite ornate and large rain chains into their design.
As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.
For a long time, global supply of energy was limited by the total number of humans in the world. We could only put more energy to work by creating more humans, or by each human working more.
And then we mechanized it.
...If we are approaching the slow but certain mechanization of intellectual labor, it’s natural to ask, “What would we ever do with a billion times the intelligence?”
I think the vast majority of intelligence supply in the future will be consumed by use cases we can’t foresee yet. It won’t be doing a billion times the same intellectual work we do today, or doing it a billion times faster, but something structurally different.
...Scaled, mechanized supply is like water....Once you figure out how to rein in water to do useful work, you simply construct a way to channel the flow of water, and then go out to any river or ocean and find some water. All water is the same, and having twice the water gives you twice as much of whatever you want to use the water for. A billion times the water, a billion times the output.
A book about the University of Washington eight-oared rowing crew that represented the United States in rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics – Men's eight in Berlin, and narrowly beat out Italy and Germany to win the gold medal.
Barthes's prose is all the time delighting in its own refinement. This is not to everyone's taste. As he asked (again in The Pleasure of the Text): "Why in a text, all this verbal display?" He goes on to say that the "prattle of the text is merely that foam of language." For his detractors this is not the foam of a tide or stream but of an overscented bubble bath to which one can develop an allergic reaction; for his admirers it is something in which to luxuriate.
The Sumida is a symbol of Tokyo, but is not like the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris, or other rivers that are woven into the geography of the city. Its banks were pushed back, so that the river became extremely wide and travelling across it feels liberating, like crossing the sea.