Washing Water

Washing Water is a socially engaged artist designed experiment on how creative sensory experiences might reconfigure our associations to water, shape our public memory of citywide events such as floods and hurricanes, and affect our local actions in the face of climate change. 

Phase 1 of the project hosts events for the public to make collectively witnessed waterscapes.

Make a Waterscape

For the length of your chosen song you control your own weather system inside a disco fishtank/glass bottom cauldron.
Pick your song and tell the DJ.
Lights, bubbles, waves, and water set the scene. Bring or select from a huge range of available symbolic objects. Use your hands to tell your own story about water. 
The event occurs in relay, so that we lend a hand to one another in a mutual aid loop outside of disaster response. 
Each waterscape is videoed from below and projected large for all to witness. 
We're playing with what's possible between our collective imagination and our relationship with water in Houston.

The petrochemical industries in my hometown are causing climate catastrophes and Houston’s population is suffering from frequent flooding and the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the United States- there’s still a city-wide cringe when it rains. But, stuck between industry shame and disaster trauma, there are limited possible moves for approaching the future differently.

So, I try opening a stagnant behavior by inviting new creative, somatic experiences.

I host water events where people share memories and improvise alternative maneuvers in their relationship with water.
They do this in a carefully, iteratively designed set up around an accessible apparatus that makes it easy to make new beautiful, moving images with water.
A camera underneath the fishtank captures and projects the earth’s-eye-view.
The event encourages surprising performances with water.
Feedback includes that people who don’t consider themselves creative feel creative, and the process brings up overwhelming associations but in a safe container.

Waterscape makers enter into a mutual aid relay of strangers.
Each person lends a hand to the person to goes before them, and leaves only the trace agreed upon by the person coming after them.
So each turn is framed by acts of cleaning, care, and accommodation
Each video builds on the turn before and and influences the turn after.
A collective dreamscape emerges,
A performative carescape is modeled.
People in the crowd talk to each other, sit taking it all in, and plan their turn for next time.
I hope some dream about it after.

Waterscape Making events have traveled through the city to permeate the public imagination. 

I want disaster recovery and preparation models to include creativity. Washing Water models an emergency response and aftercare design and distribution system that is collaboratively and collectively populated by the public imagination. 

Therapy is increasingly inaccessible with wealth inequality and privatized care, I pilot accessible community based public ceremonies that center creativity as transformative.

We are losing our sensoriums. Let's try increasing sentience to our own environments- beginning with circulating our extant technologies of care and rehearsing mutual aid outside of a disaster, creatively and with each other.

This research marks a pivot of in my research from

Can a Petrochemical holdout role switch into a test kitchen of creative approaches?
Can a cowboy-astronaut-wildcatter-immigrant-intrepid-ethos seed acts of care?
to
Can people adjust their behavior when provided the right amount of support?

What Houston does- as major petrochemical hub and acute whiplash weather zone- 4th largest city and most ethnically diverse- is a pressurized model.

New social systems emerge when existing hierarchies become untenable.
Phase 2 of the project proposes 11 custom imagined bath experiences (one per city council district) to pilot an artist designed Spa Embassy and a future where human primates spend most of our time grooming each other instead of picking fights, like Robert Sapolsky’s baboon troupe.

Phase 1 Washing Water: Waterscape Making is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
Phase 2 Washing Water : Baths is funded in part by the IdeaFund Grant.

Questions for working in the apocalypse

What are creative methods of physical, spatial, relational, and object based rearrangement for actively remapping our associative webs of meaning, on a personal, partner, and public scale? 

How can I be the artist as experiment designer that stretches science into public labs and researcher-subject relationships into reciprocity? 

Can I invent the setup for people to make last messages for the planet we are killing, using one of the human attributes that got us here- creativity? 

Is remedial sentience cultivation the most important emancipatory activism for the ongoing and upcoming violences of technological accelerationism?