Without a doubt computing has changed private and personal lives. But how has it, might it, change the public realm?
The installation WaterBar is a public water-well designed for the post-sustainability age when clean water is simply not good enough.
WaterBar geoengineers mineralized water. It begins with a cleaning stage via an anthracite filter followed by a remineralization stage
through a filter bank with select chemical properties. Water in contact with these filters receives measurable trace elements of magnesium,
iron, calcium and other elements. But the filters also share, though origin and history, a connection to place. Water travels the world in endless
cylces of evaportion and rainfall. A drop of water in Africa today may be a drop of water in Europe in the future. Waterbar accellerates the global
flow of waters through many regions of the planet, and produces a drinkable water mix in the process.
WaterBar includes quartz-rich granite from Inada by Fukushima, home of the latest devastating high-tech catastrophe; sandstone
from La Verna, Italy, where St. Francis cared for the poor; marble from Thassos Greece, source of art and architecture and the
beginning and possible end of democracy; limestone from Jerusalem/Hebron, Israel, a place of eternal conflict and shared hopes;
and basalt from Mount Merapi, Indonesia, an unpredictable, active volcano.
An internet-scanning, text-processing control system continuously circulates water through these filters,
exposing the water to trace elements of the minerals and rocks. An algorithm mixes these remineralized waters in proportion
to the intensity of related problems found in pertinent realtime online news to a daily mineralized water mix, the catch of the day.
This mix is then offered for public consumption as an antidote to the bad news on water of the day, and available only as long as
limited supplies last.
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