For the opening session of 3WDS14, performance artist Ulay refers to water as a “time-bomb” and inspires us to “artivism” by recounting his response to the organizers of the Istanbul Bienale who told him “the people of Istanbul have plenty of water and are not concerned about it”. He says he spray-painted throughout the town, under the cloak of nighttime, an “official public notice” reading, in Turkish, “Due to the privatization of the municipal water supply system, the water quota provisions for each household will be reduced by 50 percent. Saving measures are highly recommended” in order to raise the level concern for water, in a place where the privatization of water supply is a real immanent possibility. He then read from a list, as a kind of performance poem, the word “water” in 100 different languages.

The proceedings were delayed half an hour while the Symposium team troubleshot the problem on the fly and restarted the server, after which people were able to re-login, with the Tap working normally.
In “Last Drop Series”, Jason Lim delivered a sparse and delicate performance, powerful in its simplicity. Throughout 25 minutes he poured water from one glass vessel (bottle or glass) to another and back, stacking them on each other, pouring with two hands simultaneously, drinking from two glasses simultaneously, and was joined for a clinking of glasses by his partner, Daniella Beltrani, at the end. The online audience created visually stunning patterns, like weavings, using symbols alone, in the chat column.

Little Streams Make Big Rivers by Suzon Fuks and her large cast of collaborators – Alberto Vazquez, Annie Abrahams, Christian Bujold, Jaime Del Val, James Cunningham, Lila Moore, Lynette Lancini, Mahesh Vinayakram, Miljana Peric, Nicholas Ng, Pascale Barret, Rebecca Youdell, Russell Milledge, and Vicki Smith, with dramaturg: Aafke de Jong – was delivered across three Tap stages, with a handful of performers on each Tap. Whether looking at one Tap at a time, or all three concurrently, audience would have received the sound meshed together from all three stages simultaneously. The improvised, experimental and ambient nature of the sound lent itself to this format. On one stage, minimal movement, slowing changing lighting, and casual echoing of hand gestures led to overlaying of semi-faded webcam images and collaging of hands, sometimes with the appearance of one person’s fingers attached to another person’s hand. Performers on another stage created a more pragmatic feel, one augmenting his body with long sticks, one pouring water from large clay vessels, and Nicholas Ng playing Chinese lute and cymbals. On the third stage we see beer bottles as props and a spinning colour wheel. Ng plucks some interesting tones from his lute making it sound like an electronic signal, and someone begins to chant while another sounds the word “agua”.

A duet between Mahesh Vinayakram (singer) and Sukanya Ramgopal (gatham) comes like a gift after the long wait that resulted from the order changes caused by the earlier technical delays. Their fine musicality and skill as Carnatic musicians, not to mention their patience in staying on till the end for their part, was appreciated wholeheartedly by the online audience, even during the performance, with comments like “wonderful” “great performance” and “amazing and superb”.Dr Broekendukker, the clown professor that kept last year’s symposium on time, appears briefly at the end, to draw a raffle winner from the Waterwheel crowd-funding campaign.

The Waterwheel Tap screen is bright – yellow. Intermittent phrases of chat appear in the column on the right. We hear splashing and children’s voices laughing. The third Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium 2014 is beginning a week long festival with a piece by artivist Ulay, who, in recent years, has concentrated his practice around a concern for water. No Ulay yet, but James Cunningham on the ‘stage’ in Australia, encourages us to be patient.

I reflect that I am waiting in my home in New Zealand (after midnight!) to join artists and scientists, none of whom I have met, in many different parts of the world. Links between arts, science and technology have developed the Waterwheel platform devised during Suzon Fuks’ Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship. Her ‘wish list’, that saw possibilities in other platforms, resulted in a collaborative venue with a combination of tools, technology and toys!

Now Ulay appears, on the TAP screen in Slovenia. He explains to Suzon in Australia that the sound loop of splashing and laughter, was from his audio installation Water Joy made for World Water Day 2013. It played through the building in The Hague during a United Nations forum on the thematic consultation on water.

This year Ulay expresses his concerns by reciting one hundred words for water in one hundred different languages. He speaks them slowly, deliberately, like a tap dripping or water splashing. I find myself listening for familiar words and the similarities between languages. Repetition with variation makes one attentive.

In the next performance, Last Drop series by Jason Lim from Singapore, I am reminded that our first excited trials of the TAP on Waterwheel were of sharing water – pouring water from a jug in America, trickling down the webcam to the UK and continuing to the bowl in NZ. Jason Lim, alone in his stark environment, slowly pours water from one receptacle to another. He repeats the action, varies the speed – all the while the water’s sound changes its tone according to the action, volume and distance from the pouring vessel to the receiving flask below. It is mesmerising-beautiful, rhythmic and flowing.

This Zen-like performance is in contrast to the next show – a tumultuous dissonance of sound and movement. Little Streams Make Big Rivers by Suzon Fuks and guests, ambitiously uses three TAPS simultaneously and some of the many tools of the platform. TAP one is dedicated to collaborative movement; another has graphics and drawing resembling text chat making ‘waves’ and patterns cascade over the screen. The third TAP works with a cacophony of water related “music” from glass, voice, building materials and a Chinese Pipa. Similar backdrops making their ‘venue’ appear to be the same place unify the performances. I flick quickly between tabs, usually prompted by the sound from another stage.

Artists push the boundaries and capabilities of technology in the dream of ‘possibility’.

Bay Requiem, ongoing project by Mary Armentrout, Lauren Elder, Nina Haft and Ian Winters. Direction: Nina Haft.
In this original performance from the project “Bay Requiem”, Mary Armentrout and Company dance at the Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center in a mix of loose-knit interpretive styles mingled with site specific details about a place marked for impact by sea-level rise.

In this third session of the 3WD14 Symposium, ocean and saltwater flooding issues were addressed. Eight dancer/choreographers, a director and filmmaker explored the location and “scale” using the Waterwheel Tap space as the “live” stage/frame to create an intricate and layered piece of art. A good mic and a high quality video camera transformed the Tap space into an audio visual zone in which localized sound of wind and the moving dancers evolved over time.

Nina Haft and Ian Winters’ commentary and explanation of their collaborative methods and history of site, worked especially well to develop understanding of the work. Audience was intimately connected with a well-planned and shared experience; meeting and chatting with, and listening to dancers discuss their activism, and methods with the issues and the land.

To achieve a really finely tuned performance takes particular planning, rehearsal, and familiarity with what is possible, and on the Waterwheel Symposium Tap, as much as it is an informal venue, available through laptops, performing has particular challenges as a web-based and telepresent medium. “Bay Requiem” artists should be admired for the range of possibilities
they explored; giving a relatively unknown place in California, drama, history, and vitality, while expressing and evoking serious concerns with
climate change. Winters’ video overlays also lent much to the piece. Evocative and stark, they provided a time-based history to the art, as they were all performed and shot earlier, then brought in semi-transparently over the “live” dance.

Broad use of the huge open landscape as backdrop by Haft had the remarkable effect of effortlessly blowing away the small screen such that fragile human scale ran consistently through the piece. The Shoreline took on an impersonal immensity and this had a profound result. The audience was drawn in to Hayward shoreline’s history and development as reserve into a wildlife preserve for jogging and nature walks as the setting for numerous small-scale dance scenarios in which freeway noise, bird life, the Bay; and a power plant became “set.”

The deft 360 degree video tour by Winters’ gave a proper visual context and Haft discussed her directorial process using basic scripts about ‘drought’ and ‘flood’ with the dancers who then constructed the duets and trios. Ultimately, the entire piece was a mix of movement, environment, voice, video, and site specific detail revealing much about water.

“Bay Requiem” in the context of the Symposium, was “news”, “activism”, and art, addressing local concerns. Winters’ poetic films somehow evoked the domestic work and prior drudgery of the salt industry which once occupied the location. Combinations of dancers performed for nearly two hours, and in each case Haft introduced the themes being responded to and framed for the audience, the artistic intentions. The result was a quite memorable and ambitious work.

The beauty of session #4 is that it breaks down the relationship between human bodies and water. It encompasses experiences of duress, duration, embodiment, witnessing and journeying through, whilst simultaneously inviting an experience of documenting, analysing, questioning and talking about our relationships to human bodies and our understandings of water.

Atefah Khas opens the session by displaying her enormous block of ice which will be documented in meltdown over the next 7 hours (and shown over 3 Waterwheel ‘taps’ in that time). Her presentation transcends the limits of the current 1 hour session, but also requires the commitment of viewers to remain alert, keep track, think in time and stay aware of both their responses and the objective fact of this artefact disappearing through time. The performance heightens how we alternately remember and forget about the effects of global warming.

James Cunningham shows us maps of the territory he traversed along Moolabin Creek [SE Queensland]. The online performance incorporates sound, GPS tracking and the webcam mounted on his head as he walks, simulating his own visual and to a lesser extent aural perceptions. Online, we cross marshy terrains, bow into tunnels and re-emerge, re-discovering the vegetation his body passes, and presumably marks, on some level. As viewers, are we the same as the ‘he’ who walks? The he/I, you/we dichotomy is effectively dealt with via the sequence of images displayed, raising all sorts of questions about the relationship between personal experience and collective empathy-–a question demanding urgent address in the current politics of ecology. What are ‘we’ [and our decisions] if ‘we’ think or feel otherwise?

Zsuzsi Soboslay discusses the work of Melbourne’s UWPG (the Urban Water Performance Group, more recently re-dubbed the Environmental Performance Agency) at the site of Dight’s Falls on the Yarra River–a historical/personal/metatheatrical event composed as a counterpoint to the super-indulgences of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival on the shores of the Yarra in March. The group’s presentation highlights particular moments where the relationships of body to water, or bodies to sensing and ‘knowing’ water, are most
clear; both to performers and audience. The presentation also attempts to document where the performance [currently] fails. The capabilities of the Waterwheel—such as being able to draw over images with an animation tool and thereby create what I would call ‘awareness vectors’ – substantiate its capabilities as a vibrant interactive tool in real time.

Jaime Del Val positions a webcam at low point of view up towards his neck, chin and face, simultaneously highlighting and in some ways horrifying his presence as ‘human’ but also representing and perhaps unwittingly criticising the scope of human perception of environment via the speech act. There is something almost nauseating in this camera angle, the motion of his voice box exaggerated. The piece strikes me less as interactive on the ‘understanding of life as a formless process of emergent movement’ but as an assertive multidimensional narrative on the relationship between contemporary and classical philosophies–all of which have been transliterated in the ‘viewer’ dialogue box to make sure nothing is missed.

This presentation contrasts with the images Khas had supplied in her presentation of an earlier work, where her hair is died red and represented as ‘woven to water’, virtually knitting a part of the human body into an environmental process. There is also the poignant dialogue in the viewer box where she discusses the ‘Ice Block” process in interaction with viewers. As the ice melts (in Tehran) it is ’mopped up’; a viewer comments, “It is crying on the floor…like a funeral for the ice’–much as perhaps James’ walk is also a kind of requiem for what may not remain in place much longer.

The end of session ‘chat’ is an exercise in the relationship between assertion and reception. It is interesting, in the real-time experience of it, that it is relatively unmediated by a ‘chair’ or moderator, which to my mind allows for an exaggeration of the inherent perspectives (including right/wrong, fluid/fixed, masculist/feminist) in which each presenter operates.

It is intriguing that the Waterwheel can accommodate both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ presentation values. For many, the ‘hard’ values of online interactives per se are an obstruction but the Waterwheel team are making great inroads to rendering the Wheel more and more accessible and comprehensive in many different ways.

The launch of VOICE OF THE FUTURE marked an important step in including youth participation to this symposium. Contributions from Brazil, California, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, France, Germany, Greece, Kenya, Serbia, and UK showed how varied water issues are according to each country’s cultures, climate, levels of freedom of speech, and access to internet and technology in general.

Creativity & originality sparkled in:
– ‘Haikus’, an outcome of a three day workshop offered by Le Lieu Multiple’ s dynamic team from Poitiers, joined for the occasion by Colombian artist, Paula Velez. Children’s poetry was enhanced by a great use and integration of the streaming technology and particularities of the Tap interface, mixing stop motion animation, sound recordings, drawings, writing, and playful interpretation of what water means for them.
– A visual campaign about water conservation made by Michele Guieu’s primary school students. After visiting a water-plant, they encapsulated their personal and strong messages in a series of posters, and also painted different landscapes of the San Francisco Bay area, tied to their science class.
– the ‘Bottle Sphere’ performance by a primary school class from Trois Rivieres, Quebec, lead by artist Lorraine Beaulieu, enunciating facts about water & plastic bottle consumerism. A striking and sparse bird’s eye-view revealed children pouring water one by one in a black vessel representing the globe. Then, sitting around it, they were moving their empty bottles, like drifting. Accumulations of green and blue stars and paper boats formed continents, ending with a big sphere of empty plastic bottles.
– This sphere was one of the sculptures they made as a response to ‘Ask the Flask’, a global initiative by curator Keti Haliori from Athens. She offered online workshops for youth from water-scarce countries to collaborate in making art with youth from water-abundant countries. For instance, here, children from Quebec teamed up with a class from Hydra, a Greek island where rainwater, the only drinkable water, is very precious.

This first edition of Voice of the Future was a learning curve in terms of programming across timezones, respecting school schedules and youth sleep times. Future sessions would benefit by being timed to pair North and South continents. Preliminary meetings
on the Tap with educators and facilitators would help develop exciting projects, with exchange of information about resources on water issues, ideas, hints & tips. Online preparatory get-togethers with children and educators would familiarise them with specific tools available on the Tap and streaming technology (e.g. looking at how to prepare sessions according to venues, connections and equipment, and simulating similar conditions as the ones during the symposium).
Lorraine Beaulieu said: “In these live presentations, if visuals are important, sound is even more important. Above all online, for a pleasant result with a maximal and convivial listening with an international audience! Communication has fundamental rules to respect if we want to be heard and understood. I think this is an element to work on for improving children participation.”

Positive aspects of Voice of the Future comprised intergenerational dialogue, raising awareness amongst youth on environmental issues and discovering different realities, particularly in session #5. Atefeh Khas, an Iranian artist, showed part of a durational performance of an ice cube let to melt, while explaining how global warming is affecting the entire planet to children from Nairobi, who get water from the tap once a week. Several very focussed classes were brought together in the Kenyan school library, and responding to audience questions after presenting their artwork. A similar intensity was felt when youth had encounters with passers-by while doing a public intervention/performance “One Hundred Boats, One Hundred Waters” in the port of Piraeus in Greece, assisted by artist Lea Petrou.

Partaking in Voice of the Future empowered youth – giving them feelings of being heard, included and valued in a global event – with hopefully a long lasting impact. Some audience said that Voice of the Future brought together “wisdom and enthusiasm, past and future” and responded to a “need to talk to each other more”. Lorraine Beaulieu commented “Waterwheel is an interesting and extraordinary platform for communication. This was one of the greatest experiences for me as it was the first time I worked on such a performance, experimenting with a new medium of expression. On top, the children I worked with loved it! Definitely, an experience I wish to repeat.”

A lot of preparation and thought has gone into Voice of the Future to include a youth perspective for 3WDS14. The curatorial committee wanted to provide an avenue for those who will shape our world to express their care for our planet’s water.

I am entranced when we connect with St. Clement Orthodox Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya. Teacher Virginia Gathoni presents Five Precious Letters with these impoverished children who tell us about their ways of managing their scarcity of water by prudent use and reuse of bore water. They show their performance of a traditional dance to encourage more water (rain). I feel prickles of nostalgia when I hear their voices and I think I can smell the dry climate.
The reality of this apparent close contact makes think it is worthwhile: the accents of the children; the proximity of a real time link; the children’s shyness; their teachers enthusiasm. Surely we need more of this kind of thing so that all children can become more confident and familiar with communication technology.

In stark contrast to the minimal background of the Kenyan school is one hundred boats: one hundred waters by Lea Petrou in Greece.
The class from the International School of Piraeus hand out glasses of sparkling drinking water to passers by. This is an artist project and the glasses and folded boats carry designs made in collaboration with the children endorsing their plea for water quality preservation. This project is also beautifully documented at http://www.leapetrou.info

Starting in session 4 and ending in session 6, Atefeh Khas’ “Metamorphosis”, a live webcam cast of a block of ice melting, accompanied by pre-recorded music composed by Amin Hammami, raised questions. Could the work be considered a performance because 1. Atefeh declared that it was, and 2. Audience engaged with the work on the basis that it was said to be a performance? Could the work be considered performance, even without humans performing in it? Or could we consider that the humans performing in the work were Khas herself (she switched her webcam image between herself sitting indoors and the ice melting outdoors) and the work’s onlookers?
She, herself, says that the ice is the performer, slowly melting over hours. I certainly had a feeling similar to watching a live durational performance – being witness to an event as it unfolds in real time. I found it addictive, and the format of streaming live video of the event in bursts (20 minutes or so at a time over the duration of the ice melting, which lasted 8 hours) fitted well into the format of the symposium as a whole.

Bonnie Hart also offered a webcast of a live performance, “Ebb and Throw”, in which she tossed litter she had collected that very day from her local creek, onto a sculpture, that in the dark, lying on floor, had the overall size and curves that gave it a body-like resemblance. Super-8 film projected from various angles then lit the sculpture with colourful ever-changing imagery, and a handheld microphone amplified shuffling sounds combined with a gurgling soundtrack that seemed to be composed of toilet flushes and underwater recordings. The climax of the piece comes when Bonnie lays down with the sculpture, caressing it with one hand and with the other, switches internal lights on and off.

In Pegi Marshall-Amundsen and Suzon Fuks’ “The Empress’ Tears”, 4 aligned-in-a-grid images show two webcam angles each of the two women performing with water-filled fish tanks, pouring in water, playing with floating rubber figures, dispensing ink into the water… Their actions are rehearsed to coincide with each other, timed with the soundscape made up of electronic music and water sounds, which, doubled with the fact of having each a second angle of their actions, and flipping lower webcams vertically so as to “reflect” the upper ones, created visual rhythm, and visual communication between images, for example, when water is poured into a fishtank in the upper image, it appears to go through the frame into the lower webcam image. They use similar objects too – the same kind of fishtanks, glass jugs, etc. creating a visual uniformity that supports the formal concerns of symmetry, reflection, repetition, rhythm, visual design and a choreographic movement between the frames of the webcam images.

As the 12-minute piece progresses, the transparency of the water becomes coloured with ink, and the women wrap their fishtanks with brightly-coloured caution tape, the kind used to delineate a damaged public site, one with the word “CAUTION”, the other with “DANGER”.

‘Metamorphosis’, a time-based installation by the environmental artist Atefeh Khas (Iran), refers not only to global warming and the daily phenomenon of melting ice on Earth, but the common apathy in the face of it. Khas carefully prepared an ice cube and placed it outdoor to melt naturally. She showed the gradual disappearance of the cube through a webcam, streaming the process on the Tap.

As a centralizing point in space and time, the Tap, in this work, illustrated the collective awareness of separation from the environment. The need to overcome the split between people, environment and news media’s reports on climate change echoed in the soundscape. On one hand, the juxtaposition of the small cube with an ambient sound of powerful glaciers cracking, arctic wind and chimes denoted environmental interconnectedness and a shared human destiny.

On the other hand, the powerful sound of breaking ice, which didn’t reflect directly the environment streamed live on the Tap, recalled news media reports on climate change that, no matter how severe, seem to lack direct context, thus, dissolve ineffectively in the noisy postmodern media landscape.

Bonnie Hart’s performance ‘Ebb & Throw’ engaged with the obscure and lethal interaction of people, industrial waste and nature. Streamed live on the Tap, the relationship of humans with trash in the sea was performed as toxic and addictive romance. Plastic debris, Hart’s movements, artificial lights and celluloid sea moved like mollusk, forming into a body of mutating organisms.
‘The Empress Tears’ was performed on the Tap by two remote characters portrayed by installation and performance artist, Peggy Marshall-Amundsen (Wilmington, North Carolina), and experimental multidisciplinary artist, Suzon Fuks (Brisbane). Each character inhabited two webcams placed side by side with one character on top of the other, forming a rectangle screen.

The space was divided into four small screens/webcams so that when the character on the top looked down at her aquarium she was also facing the other character whose webcam was positioned beneath her though upside down. The characters were shown from a frontal point of view of their upper body with an emphasis on heads and hands as they were handling objects and liquids in an aquarium, and from a perspective beneath each aquarium.

This created the impression that the viewers were also watching the actions from the perspectives of the water in the aquariums. The fluid from which dinosaurs and sunglasses evolved became a performer, a subject and object. The tendency to focus on the weight of human activity was inverted not only through an upside down performer in a webcam, but by using the webcam to create the illusion that the water is watching and reflecting on the situation.

However, as the performance progressed, the views of the water were increasingly obstructed by human action and language, until the water disappeared entirely, and was marked out by signs as a danger zone. At that point, the chance-like evolutionary aspect of the creative process, which was sustained and embodied by water, came to a halt.

In ‘Water Sense’, the researcher Alireza Hejazi (Iran), presented the paradoxical gap between the technological and scientific treatment of water, the notion of water in myth and poetry, and the disputed rights and sense of water. He showed how easily water and its perception can be maneuvered, with a video of a flowing stream turning upside down. The visual metaphor evoked the artificial management of watercourses, and the mechanical movement involved in turning on a tap of water and watching the flow insensibly.

The challenges involved in the management of watercourses were further discussed in a photo-essay by Eklavya Prasad, (India). A social worker, artist photographer and managing trustee of Cloud’s Water Campaign, Prasad undertook extensive travels in the north Bihar flood plains to address issues concerning groundwater, livelihood, drinking water, sanitation, and floods. Describing the camera as a ‘soul-mate,’ his photographic views disclose to outsiders the innate resilience of the region’s population against the disastrous effects of annual flooding.

The poetic photographs illustrate the total failure of the embankments constructed to combat the floods, which even brought an increase in flooding. The local women and adolescent girls, who stay behind whilst the men leave the region to find work elsewhere, appear to bravely carry the burden of the natural disasters in resourceful ways. Images of children playing in flood waters and mud, stress in a situation where flooding is a way of life.
Nevertheless, a new outlook bringing new solutions to problems such as sanitation and livelihood could be on the horizon. As Prasad’s imagery implies, it may emerge from the wisdom and vision of the local women, and a new generation of literate girls, whose contacts with the environment is essential for understanding and managing floods.

Understanding the communication of floods is a topic explored by the artist Joolie Gibbs (Australia). Her work and findings were inspired by the Mary River and the increased flooding in recent years around Gympie in Queensland due to climate change. Gibbs discovered that after the floods, debris on farmers’ fences produced patterns out of grasses, branches, mud, etc, which she documented in numerous photographs. These patterns, the inspiration to her visual art works, gave the impression that the floodwater communicates through visual language. Similar to graffiti, the floodwater displayed anarchic disregard of authority and ownership of public and private spaces. The floodwater seemed to regard fences like graffiti artists have regarded walls. The soundscape composed for this project by Carlotta Ferrari (Italy) is a sonic expression of this volatile correspondence between civilized, measured space and unbound nature.

Describing the flood communication as ‘Flood Language’, Gibbs asks: Is it possible that the flood is doing this as an act of defiance, perhaps demanding a new relationship between nature and civilization? Or, is it possible, as Prasad implies (See chat box) that there is a ‘local understanding which is written off under the pretext of advanced ‘knowledge”? Hence, in dealing with environmental issues, ‘Flood Language’ and ‘Water Sense’ could serve as ‘strong tools of persuasion’.

This session explored the crossroads of art and science both in terms of artists selecting scientific topics or natural phenomena for their works and scientists using artists to portray their data or provide them with unique perspectives. The first presenter, Piibe Piirma, is a media artist and teacher from Estonia who has studied and photographed tiny unicellular plants in her work. Not only has she displayed the intricate patterns, shapes, and colors of the beautiful organisms in her art, she has also cared for the cultures while translating science into poetry. Piibe curated an exhibition displaying the photos and paintings of the tiny plants that also serve as the subject of her doctoral research.

Ana Laura Cantera is a professor of visual arts from Argentina who is working with fuel cells that extract energy from contaminated water via microorganisms that can metabolize organic materials and co-metabolize toxic metals. The artistic rendition of these fuel cells included creating human-like objects that would slowly decompose, which she used as a metaphor for human’s overexploiting and destroying the natural environment. She also presented a project that highlighted the cycling of energy in natural and human systems as exhibited by the flow of bioelectrical energy through the water, fuel cells, microorganisms, and human figures that slowly transformed.
The third presenter was Esther Moñivas, an art historian and professor of contemporary art from Spain, who specializes in the aesthetics of materials and, especially, water. The topic of “art and science dialogues” was discussed in terms of its potential to promote new synergies between the two fields utilizing water as the source of imagination. She also discussed how complex and often confusing issues in water quality, politics and management can be communicated more effectively to the public through the medium of art. Some of the artistic projects emerging from her art-science dialogues, including videoart, paintings and textural works, were reviewed.

The final presenter was West Marrin, a water scientist and former professor from Hawaii, who discussed the sharing of interdisciplinary perceptions via the use of spatial and temporal patterns common to both the natural world and the arts. He reviewed the work of several artists that have focused on the use of patterns and rhythms within the nature to design structures or strategies that have been installed in the aquatic environment to enhance natural processes or have been exhibited to effectively communicate the threats to our watery world.
A common theme among all the presentations was the potential for artists and scientists to collaborate in ways that will enhance their respective works and provide a more effective means of communicating water issues to the public.

The panel with Keti Haliori, Amy Sharrocks, and Man’ok explored the future of water as resource and object of the imagination. Focusing on shrinking global supplies and implications of scarcity through their art, artists discussed the power of history and water as “commons.” Haliori’s “World Water Museum Installation” and Sharrocks’ “Museum of Water” have different intentions, yet both alert audiences to challenges of keeping clean water on the planet. Haliori’s pseudo-scientific inquiry positions drought, climate change, pollution–and water–as precious “items” to be viewed both as collective vat and individual samples. It is duly fetishized. Haliori activates the public through asking for samplings of rivers and lakes. Because drastic environmental changes at individual sampled location is not prerequisite, the “museum” successfully draws a static, hypothetical “frame” around a resource that is hardly static. The work comments thus on the state and history of world water supplies as both changing and limited and, indeed, in Greece, where Haliori is from, fresh water has a long and erratic story.

Sharrocks is known for large performances, “SWIM on 12 July 2007” , “drift” (2009), and “London is a River City”, 2011. The latter is a series of public walks tracing seven of the city’s buried rivers mapping urban water as a series of specific places; of intimacy and non-intimacy with that water history. The public encounters the city in new ways, including one on one paddling and group bathing. “Museum of Water” also engages the public. In this moment of relative plenty, it is a growing collective vision of 300 plus bottles for future generations to consider. Like Haliori, Sharrocks focuses upon access to clean water, providing a “water bar” near the sidewalk “museum”vitrines.
She aims at how we can explore water now and save it for the future. But, the “museums” differ, too. The samples are fresh water v. highly personal first morning pee, tears, water from a holy river in India, a burst London water main, ice from a Sussex field, a melted snowman, 20-year-old evaporated snow from Maine, condensation from a Falmouth window, Hackney rainwater, a new born baby’s bath water. Sharrocks’ work ends up posing questions around “entitlement” and class as a determinant of access to water.

Finally, Man’ok theater joined and discussed “Rhapsodie Aquatique”, a skit-like work taking place on a floating set floats which at night, in the pitch black is all color, flashing lights, and plastics transforming the unlit natural setting. Utilizing the lake, Man’ok is forced to engage the natural environment while consciously controlling it. Audiences are transformed as mundane “nature” becomes culture. Water is an absence disappearing without light, or when illuminated, reflecting the piece. Similar to other events they have staged, this piece activates a public space. The Rhapsodie Aquatique – reportage http://vimeo.com/54089227

#17 was an exciting panel despite small technical issues. Non-French speakers could see, listen and ask questions in English on the chat. 3WD14 drew upon “location”as a temporary international event on the Waterwheel Tap.

The provocative artworks connected the idea of “location”; both natural, cultural and chosen; geographical and historical. One came away thinking about water as necessity, fetish; flow. Who has kept water for whom? How do we remember or erase water in today’s spatial landscape?

‘Speak 4.0/LIQUID’ by Alejandra Ceriani, Fabricio Costa Alicedo, Javiera Sanz and Fabián Kesler – from Buenos Aires, Argentina

This original performance not only realized the aesthetic interaction between machines and man — using MOLDEO, created by Fabrizio, where movements generated by Alejandra (the dancer) and the sounds generated by Fabian (the musician) produced images of the projection which feed back movements and sounds in a beautiful co-creation — but they went further by involving the audience, who, via android smart phones, could change the projected images.
So, who modified what to whom?
Space and time, a new dimension, passive (audience) and active (performers) are part of a whole, a true and inclusive co-creation.
The authors’ description is very clear:

“Through the proposed interface, the ‘Speak 4.0/LIQUID’ installation will be broadcast live via Waterwheel. The facility may be operated by other devices connected to the network (Tablets
and Smartphones) through tangible interfaces protocol: TUIO (TuioDroid for android systems TuioPad for iOS systems). These touch devices, by simply pointing to an internet address, can take over the installation, affecting the image and sound. Also, the Waterwheel platform is treated within Moldeo as a picture, and the resulting image incorporated within the installation.

“Speak 4.0/LIQUID”, in which the Internet is used as a living tissue capable of transmuting from a remote part of the world, is set to be created in real time in Buenos Aires. We let go of our creation and we travel through Waterwheel to other users involved and contributing to this dialogue that the new communications technologies allow us. A work that is diluted and filtered in launching a global network signal from one geographical area to flow into the digital space and convene the interested community to contribute to the final result of the work as a continuous development process. In other words Speak Liquid is configured as a version of the performance that conforms not only through formal processes produced by its members, but also through the contributions that sensitive Waterwheel users can make in a dynamic co-creation process.”

Hailing from the small coastal town of Yeppoon, Queensland, the team of Rhonda Truscott, Sharyn Lowth, Shelly McArdle and Jo Hardy present “Fresh meets Salt” which traces the course of Fig Tree Creek from its fresh water source to the sea. As each phase of its journey is presented with spoken words, photos, field-recordings and written adjectives, the audience is invited to add their own words suggested by the imagery. The water and land care expertise in this team shines through as they, in responding to the audience, elaborate on any aspect of this set of ecosystems that have undergone regeneration.

From Brisbane, the clowns Jeff Turpin, Anna Yen and Therese Collie present “The Magnificent Object Workers”, three “top professors” presenting their “research”. A reluctant MC, bad accents that get abandoned then salvaged, word misuse and dottery presentations, are mixed with power plays, acrobatics, music, dodgy demonstrations of proof and the theory of a cockroach “force field” that has sustained them through evolutionary time, and can be measured by a “terrormeter”. Possibly as a reference to the amount of water cockroaches can survive on, they round off with a three-part rendition of gospel hymn “Bring a Little Water to Me”.

From Taipei, Taiwan, Margaret Shiu and Catherine Lee present the “Plum Tree Creek Project” they created with artist / curator Wu Mali.
Supported by a well-produced video and illustrative slideshow, this eloquent presentation gives a detailed overview of this award-winning community-based art project that both inspires and reconnects residents with their local creek through monthly breakfasts, land-art sculptures over the creek, eco-education in schools, traditional knowledge, public information-sharing stalls, cooking classes using ingredients grown along the creek, and a theatre show involving an inter-generational cast.

“Putawai-Becoming Creek” by Houghton Valley (NZ) residents Miranda Munro, Jenny Rattenbury and Grant Corbishley is a large-scale community project towards raising the valley’s creek that was inundated with industrial waste 60 years ago. Already mobilised in environmentalism and identity-building, the community dove into archaeological digs that kicked off the project. The project has manifested many micro-projects including a visual art mapping and sound collaboration, story-telling, spring-cleaning the valley, photographic and video works, a children’s book, “Letters to the Creek” community writing project, and teapots submerged in the creek banks for delivering messages to the creek.

Through art, humour, poetics and communication, the group has raised the valley residents’ dreams and spiritual connection to place, as a seedbed for the hard yakka to follow putting in place an impermeable layer of clay on top of the landfill to catch rain and springwater that will flow into a new version of the creek.

FLUID VALUES was the theme proposed by the Cairns node, curated by Russell Milledge and Rebecca Youdell from Bonemap, and hosted at James Cook University.

Jenny Fraser, screen-based artist, curator and Murri of mixed ancestry, opened
the Indigenous perspectives and Cultural Bridge panel by demonstrating how Indigenous knowledge goes way back, with an example of a Picabeen basket. An ancient technology allowed bark to resist fire and boil water, which anthropologically, distinguishes the so-called ‘primitive’ societies. Jenny doesn’t define herself as a spokesperson for water per se, but is currently preparing a new documentary series “the Grief of the Reef”. In a world heritage listed area, where mining and mega ports are developing, she wants ‘to put the Aboriginal voices back into the picture’. She plans to interview some of the seventy traditional owner groups, custodians for the Great Barrier Reef. With ironic and scathing humour, she showed previous works: “the Gods Juice” a plastic bottle of water with a transformed label, and “Black Gold” challenging the idea that the Great Barrier Reef is ’protected’ with constant surveillance by oil mining companies and impact of tourism.

Ian Clothier, based in Plymouth New Zealand, welcomed people to the space with a traditional Maori greeting, including people physically present but also in spirit. He then gave an apology from Dr Te Huirangi Waikerepuru and played a recorded message about how water is fundamental for genealogy in Maori culture. Water connects people and places. When people meet, they ask first ‘which water do you come from’.

Te Urutahi Waikerepuru then sang a waita (chant) to honour the mountains that surround us, to preserve the wisdom and knowledge of ancestor goddess, the Primary Female Principal of the Waters of Life. “… We are genealogically tied to the environment. Water is me and I am the water.” Te Urutahi’s visual artwork personifies and humanises water. It inspires respect and gives ‘presence’ to Water on the planet.

Ian Clothier, explained that being hybrid Polynesian allows him to bridge cultures. He introduced himself as “coming from the sea”, a major metaphor of his origins. He displayed aerial photos of North and South Islands,
and situated Norfolk Island on a map of the Pacific Ocean, relativising proportions of sea covering most of that side of Earth! An inverted image evoked strongly the womb where sand patterns of the sea bed became clouds, while waves seen from above lined the ocean floor. He is preparing next year’s SCANZ15 symposium on the theme “Water & Peace”

Reinvigorating my perception of water, the panel confirmed that learning from Aboriginal and Islander people’s traditional knowledge and integrating it to our contemporary lives, should be a priority for the planet’s survival.

Braving torrential rain, the tropical Pacific feast from Cairns node continued with a panel on conservation of marine habitat.
Jüergen Freund and Stella Chiu-Freund, conducted an 18-month photographic expedition in The Coral Triangle, commissioned by WWF. They communicate their passion for the sea through their stories and amazing pictures. They use “split-level photography consisting of a glass dome placed at the front of the camera lens or/and a 180 degrees fisheye lens, exposing both underwater as well as the topside of a seascape or freshwater landscape”. About 20 sea snakes bundled together at low tide, hiding in mangroves roots, and a crocodile swimming in Papua Guinea, are two impressive images that stay with me. This work illustrates the importance of conservation and helps reducing extinctions of some marine species.

As a dessert, ending the session, Bonemap performed ‘The exquisite liquid, song for water’ with an admirable and skillful use of the frame. Russell Milledge focused on the interactivity between elements, the specificity of the streaming technology and agency of the public. He prepared scripted animations to be activated by online audience, and ‘patches’ to process media live and to layer them even more than what the Tap tools already offer. However unforeseen conditions didn’t allow the entire dispositif to function as planned. But audience didn’t know, and saw from an underwater soundscape, animated cartoon bubbles escaping the stage window, magnifying body close-ups of Rebecca Youdell dancing with an iPod camera. Her playful presence, improvisation qualities and attention to the overall rendered moving imagery, demonstrated her experience as an online performer.

A grey bay in south Melbourne; a fishing boat in deeper harbour overseas. Red fingernails folding paper boats, pushed across shallows: a different paper boat folded against a coiled rope on the edge of the boat, a different sea. Whirls and eddies, a merging of submergences; long hair, rope coils, red dresses, green seas.

‘Ocean Synapse’ was a glorious affirmation of the online interactive capability offered by the Waterwheel. Sarah Jane Pell and Benjamin Burke uploaded their respective performance videos/documents and let play what will. Remarkable synchronicities of colours, gestures and symbols occurred.

Pell had constructed a performance involving 3 women, red dresses, small red paper boats, and dives below water. Burke gets onto a fishing boat and tapes what happens, in cabin and on deck. Jumpers and compasses; edges and waves. Above and below.
The huge potential for poetry to occur in the interactions is illustrated in the audience comments, logged as follows:

LCE: These are really lovely images
ZS: …hair like a mermaids
ZS: And the fisherman?
A: no fisherman, Sarah and [R] are lovers..
ZS: paper boat upside down becomes a hat and a yoni…

The timelessness of readiness, of chance. Here, the continuity of camerawork, taking it all in, lets things happen. I lament how intentional ‘documents’ miss capturing significant events: “I’ve eaten leaves and soil during performances and always wished someone had caught it on video”. In such an event as Waterwheel provides, asynchronous events come into sync in surprising ways, reminding us of the deep interconnectedness between us and within water, and especially, despite our usual editing processes. Pell and Burke agreed to ‘meet’ online and see what happened. It is clear the delight was both theirs and ours.

This session focused on the diverse patterns and rhythms (cycles) in nature and their portrayal in artworks or applicability to understanding and perceiving the world in novel ways.

Jolian Solomon, an Australian artist and teacher, presented still photos and videos of shallow tidal waters in Queensland’s Great Sandy Strait. The combination of a shallow light-colored bottom and a filming schedule that spanned different seasons and weather conditions illustrated the ever-changing patterns of the water forms and permitted the viewer to experience a mosaic of merging rhythms and shapes.

Moving from the small-scale patterns of water flow forms to the mega-scale patterns and cycles of planetary water, William Waterway presented his interpretation of the interaction of three great water cycles: oceanic, atmospheric and cosmic. William is an author and water
advocate who has presented his work on numerous radio and television programs and has spoken to the United Nations about water.
The combination of these three cycles connects water from the core of the Earth to that in the outer reaches of the cosmos. His view of the water cycle reminds us that we share this substance with all existence for all time.

Lauren Elder is an artist and teacher from the San Francisco Bay Area who has worked with children at an education center that is particularly vulnerable to the projected rise in sea levels associated with climate change. Models of the shoreline, which were based on the intricate patterns of the Bay’s inlets and marshes, were slowly flooded with water to simulate sea level rise and the inundation of recognizable structures. As such, the children could see how temporal patterns of sea level rise interact with the spatial patterns of the shoreline.

All three presentations demonstrated the effectiveness and simplicity of perceiving water and its processes through patterns and cycles.

Some time has passed since session #32 of the 3WDS online event. It is now June 2014 and #32 took place back in March. What kind of online event was this? That it might constitute a memory, experience or embodiment for an observer distanced by time and place. What form could this temporal separation take? There is no longer anticipation of the event unfolding—it has unfurled. Its occurrence has generated residue and traces. These are traces of difference and interpretation in the minds and experiences of individuals and communities involved. What is there to gain from the physicalisation of the residue cast by session #32 now? What is the nature of reenactment to a network performance? Replay or recast? The remains are only the attestation of the minds eye—memory transposed to abstract textual symbols—the filter of words. Can the act of writing about #32 claim a commensurate liveness? Already re-generational in re-mediation from the physical gesture of the instigating moment of the now—that was then. What can a distant witness contribute through the feebleness and fallacy of words but another instance of action—another embodiment of the moment?

A transmission of presence in the moment of action—networked performance must be impaired or interpolated. There is an inherent contradiction when liveness is mediatised. Rather than the state of sense-awareness inherent in the term ‘liveness’, we become sense-impaired when sensation is mediatised. Experience is limited to the transmission of telematics. The embodiment is an extension of the machine—the zero dot one dot zero dot one dot zero of network settings conveying the velocity of 0101010. The network is conspicuous for its intermediality—at its best a doorway or portal to a parallel dimension and at its least a reduction to an insignificant epitome.

Where then does this leave the recasting of #32? What chance is there to re-spatialise the event, but to reduce its function to the mechanistic extension, just so to claim for it a portentous re-enchantment. A synesthetic re-enactment through the deftness of telaesthesia, as follows:

I am looking for the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in East Oakland, it is early Friday evening and the traffic is horrendous. Finally, I get past the Oakland Coliseum and soon give up as Google Maps is deceiving me. However, taking the second left I arrive at the factory, locate the tunnel and the stairs. Relieved to find the event is running late—a moment to breathe. The MilkBar is an excellent venue, there is a nice light filtering through the windows. I am using the moment to take in the dark timbers and the group of art students preparing their content. Molly Hankwitz and Ian Winters are readying the space and equipment, there are about ten of us. There is an alternative energy associated with the event and, like similar events around the globe, speak of artistic resilience against the political rationalization of everyday life.

It begins. First up is a historical film introduced as a seminal work of experimental filmmaking. It is Ralph Steiner’s H2O. The projection, already a digitized copy of a black and white 1929 film is remediated as a webcam experience for an online audience participating in the 3WDS symposium. There is no online sound, but the visual rhythms represented in the film are so evocative of sound that synesthesia takes over.
Two more experimental works are screened, Metamorphosis, a 2013 colour video by the Iranian environmental artist Atefeh Khas, that uses time-based techniques to show in a very short duration what is happening to the Earth on a bigger scale. The third screening is from the San Francisco based artist Allison Holt, EXPERIMENT 2 produced in 2008, with sound by BJ Nilsen and Stillupsteypa

The noise emanating from a BART train on the tracks outside the venue interrupts the proceedings, but it is of little consequence to the teleportation I experience that has immediately relocated me to the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. An act of great transmogrification now demands that my experience of #32 is concluded as a member of the online audience. There is a laptop in front of me. The only consolation to this predicament is being in the relative comfort of the balmy tropical location that I now find myself in.

My sudden absence from the MilkBar in San Francisco appears un-noticed and has been masked by the sudden arrival of a group of six new audience members to the venue. I know this as I am privileged to the water-wheel.net Tap chat, to which Molly Hankwitz has been keeping the online audience informed of the comings and goings at the venue.

The experience of #32 is now extenuated, the encompassing awareness of the venue as a spatial volume inhabited by the substantiation of individuals and their orientation and vectors in space has gone. Reduced to a limited pallet of sensory information the visual and aural has become intensified. My personal orientation is now from a single perspective, which is provided by the venues camera lens pointing to the Internet video stream. My presence and gesture has transferred to the rant of the chat window, the rest of the evening performances unfold. I discover that the online experience is much more didactic. There are voices here, coming through the medium of the chat text, that convey all manner of additional information and context to the performances at the venue. For example, I learn how to make perfectly clear blocks of ice, about photons of light masquerading as liquid—water-refracting light opposing the camera’s perspectival eye.

On the screen, I watch a dancers body whose movements are visceral, more interpretive of a body of water than the shimmering illusion of the fluid patterns being projected. Is it improvised? Now contained and framed the generative chaotic pattern transmits a liquid code—the code-reader is the dancers tacit intuition. The dance installation is a work by Susan Sentler and dancer Tiffany Tonal. Susan Greene and Yaser Murtaja conclude the evening after Ana Labatista’s group present documentation of the work Speaking Tributaries.

I see in these works displacements and other modalities. Questions are drawn about the ways we mediate between the structures and architectures of these modalities. For example, questions between the gallery’s surface and the performance paradigm of embodiment; between liveness and the mediatized; between the temporal and the static; the spatial and the monoptical?

The #32 3WDS Tap event ends and the portal closes. Tomorrow I will go out, into the torrid world of northern Australia, thinking about temporal displacements and subjective embodiment and how these constitute new ways of participating in aesthetic experiences.

Peter Hall introduces himself as head of a university department that has recently adopted a Design Futures degree largely based on Tony Fry’s philosophy of “repositioning design in a larger environmental and social context, and refusing to make design simply a formal or vocational activity”.

Narratives of design (and communication) permeate even the layout of this session. All three presenters spontaneously positioning their webcams as close as possible to the audience chat, with Peter, as facilitator, at the bottom nearest the audience’s typing field. As each speaker take their turn, the others subtly move themselves off to the side and reduced the size of their own image, so as to give space to the presenter.

Angela Morelli brings our attention to “the elephant in the room” in the water crisis: the massive amount of water that is used in the production of the food we consume, and points to the research of the Water Footprint Network that supported “Virtual Water”, her design project on the topic. On communication design in general she quotes Nathan Shedroff’s idea of the organisation of information, focusing on two key aspects: organization and storytelling, and in the task of communicating data she proposes reader-driven
over author-driven approaches, and what she calls “story-listening”.

We see Uli Westphal watching on and listening intently, almost with a childlike admiration for Angela’s synthesis of design and communication concepts, as well as in the functionality of the Tap interface as he discovers it. He then shows us beautiful images from his ongoing “Mutatoes” project, in which he grows fruit and veggies from rare and original seed banks that display an amazing diversity of shapes, size and colour within a single fruit or veggie type, as well as diversity of species, all of which are filtered from mainstream commercial food production and sale, for aesthetic, packaging or image reasons in favour of uniformity and profit-making.

Westphal photographs these strangely beautiful “ready-made sculptures from nature” in a glossy commercial style, arranging them by size and colour gradation, forming images that for him might be for viewers “a starting point of a personal inquiry into the food system”.

The lively discussion that follows between these three design experts centres on the values of diversity and the almost shameful uniformity that governs the food supply chain, and its insidious affect on the taste of consumers. Westphal remains optimistic, though, in his faith in the power of the consumer in changing values in the market place.

In the performing arts it is said that when children or animals are involved, everything else fades to the background. That was the case in these beautiful and moving performances, and when this is added to by the possibilities inherent in children from Poitiers coming into contact with children from Coburg, and both sides seeing each other’s performances, the effect is more than touching.

The Poitiers children definitely did preliminary work, helped by their teachers, editing videos, images, etc., and with clear slogans produced artistic material using simple technologies available to everyone.
Haiku poems, created by themselves, and recited with innocence and spontaneity were moving — everything flowed like water from rivers — and regardless of whether you understood French or German, the images, gestures and attitudes transcended language.
Mariana Carranza, Mathías Wolf, Sebatian Solari, Chris Sugrue, Gorka Cortázar, Stephan Wolf and MediaLab-Prado also presented “Seas and Juggling” (Mares y Malabares), an interactive performance between technology and jugglers’ movement, made by young people. Beautiful pictures and sounds resulted, with very attractive light effects.

The artists say:
“mares y malabares is an interactive audio-visual performance that combines fields of arts and science in a multidisciplinary and co-creative project. Jugglers and acrobats generate virtual waves of an ocean in which they are immersed. Sounds and visuals are created with applications that connect the patterns of juggling with formulas of environmental fluid dynamics in real time. Maritime images are displayed immersively onto multiple screens. The audio mixes water-sounds with sound-waves to generate “whale songs” and “dolphin sounds”. Engineers, programmers and artists worked together on this piece.”

Although the webcast of a projection on a wall doesn’t do justice to Silke Bauer’s video listing the names of the longest rivers in the world at the beginning of the session, the team of Hydromemories hosting this session in Berlin reassure the online audience that all the videos they will show are available on the Waterwheel media centre for better viewing later. Numerous times during the session, one or two team members take the webcam roving throughout the building showing us different installations, and explaining the artists’ intentions and methods, putting us right there in the space, the ultimate result one could expect from a web-streamed event.

Much of the rest of this session, however, are spoken presentations in front of projected PowerPoint slideshows or projected videos that would have been better viewed directly in the Tap. Presented as such, most of the written text of the slideshows is illegible to us online viewers, and the spoken word not very easy to catch either. I found the information written in the chat very helpful, as Hydromemories gave titles, names and brief explanations there.

Amongst the presentations and videos projected, two representatives from Engineers Without Borders illustrating the global scope of their work, focusing on a water-tank building project in Tanzania; Uli Westphal
shows timelapse video of himself constructing DIY garden and wind-powered irrigation systems for inner-city urban rooftops in Berlin; a presentation about the Media Spree urban development program, says that the organization behind the development has ignored 87% of resident disapproval of the development and the high-rise gentrification it brings to the riverfront; and a video on Silke Bauer’s work with marine invader organisms and ballast water.

Amongst many installations from artists from Germany, Italy, Portugal, England and Spain, one work has various food and beverage items on a shelf arranged according to the water footprint of their production, and another striking piece, by Nuno Vicente, is an open metal box with perforated sides and containing photographs. The box has spent one month submerged under water, and, with the help of the hand-held webcam, we look in to see the result on the photos inside.

Italian sound artists Riccardo Bertan and Elvis Marangon take the idea of “wet sound” to the extreme in “Reflections”, a live electronic sound set with a video of whales and other deep-sea creatures behind them. Despite the sound coming across online being regularly distorted by peaking out, we get an overall sense of immersion from this rich soundscape that resembles, or in fact is made up of, sonar pulsing, waves and underwater recordings. There is an overall arch to the piece that I would describe as going from the surface to deep submersion and back.

HydroSonics, spanned two sessions, hosted at NYU Steinhardt, curated by Leah Barclay, and produced by Ear to the Earth, was a worldwide network for environmental sound art based in New York City. The 6-hour programme was split into two parts with artists of high caliber. Very verbal, the online audience commented (here in italics) on the amazing quality of the performances. Riveted and transfixed, they wondered when to take a break to not miss anything.

SESSION 39 kicked off with the Australian Voices live. They premiered Leah Barclay’s new work ‘Distill’. Transported into a ‘quiet nature’, people appreciated the human voices mixed with field recordings of the Amazon river, rendering a textured and dense landscape with so many nuances. Then, an improvisation took place between musicians in NY and Mahesh Vinayakram in Chennai. In the previous session, Mahesh sang a carnatic shloka (South Indian chant) dedicated to the water of the sacred Ganges River. He also played morsing (mouth harp), with enchanted listeners feeling ‘blessed’ and ‘so impressed to see and hear all these performances from all parts of the world’. ‘Yes! Amazing! Connecting people through art and science…connecting continents and communities.’

Feelings of being embraced by nature triggered auditive sensitivities with David Monicci’s composition ‘Stati d’Acqua’. ‘I LOVE THIS SO MUCH! this person is very talented with water recordings and filters!’ typed one person, and another being inspired said ‘great soundscape for film, dance and life in general… could be great to collaborate’.

Fernando Godoy’s audio-visual treat ‘Hidrofonias: 607kms’, based on field recordings collected on three rivers and a glacier in Chile, suggested an ‘immersive web painting’, ‘so organic’, ‘like cells’, ‘like a birth’, ‘…a creation’.

Julie Rousse and Jacques Perconte gave us a foretaste of ‘Mille Lumiere’, one hour before their concert in the Poitiers’ Planetarium. After collecting images and sounds of the city, they processed them live, projected in HD on the hemispheric screen of the planetarium. Deconstruction of matter, granulation, playing on digital compression… a contemporary rendering reminding me of artworks from the 70’s using photocopies of photocopies. Link between pixels and H2O molecules, fluidifying digits through the various states of water… so many interpretations came to mind.
‘One has the impression of being in a cave on a boat’, ‘transported in vegetal and cosmic universe’, ‘Water dust‘, ‘Glitches from universe, in between black holes’, ‘visually impressionistic’, ‘bound by water’.

Sergey Jivetin’s ‘Voluminous HydroLogic’ inspired by the fragility of the equilibrium of the hydrologic cycle, was an installation using medical tubing filled with water, run by a peristaltic pump and powered by solar energy. First shown in a hospital, it was meant for patients as a meditation piece, to alleviate their anxiety. A fantasmagoric perfusion machine, modified to run with the air bubbles: ‘water going through life support drip?, ‘our blood system’, ‘The machine looks alive :)’, ‘white noise & blue blood’, ‘so peaceful and mesmerising!’

SESSION 41
The diversity of HydroSonics was stunning. Some commented that the second part, the finale of the symposium, was ‘good for radio’, with Leah as a dynamic announcer. However we definitely experienced an internet event, not only webcast, but with an interactive and very active audience online, and present in NYU too.
Joel Chadabe introduced Ear to the Earth: ‘We view environmental art, in sound and image, as vibrant and engaging communication. Sound communicates the way we feel about something. Image makes the ‘something’ specific.’ He then invited the public to listen to Garth Paine’s ‘Presence In the Landscape’ and the premiere of Eric Leonardson’s ‘Awash on the Lake’. Paine’s field recordings, gathered while kayaking in Bundanoon (NSW), plunged everyone into ‘very subtle’ ‘morning sounds from Australia’, merging with our actual morning sound in the Pacific: ‘if I turn it (the computer sound) up through the window maybe a chorus of birds will arrive’, ‘Now, you must imagine it’s not afternoon, nor night for us, it’s early morning, sunrise and you listen to these birds outside’ typed someone in Argentina.
Eric Leonardson’s piece evoked Lake Michigan’s landscape, from its depths to its amplitude and force. ‘Atmospheric’, said a person in Cairns. ‘Will be great if the Tap can go mobile and we can be participants in journeys through the territory.’ ‘I liked Eric Clapton. From now on, I like Leonardson as well!’ responded someone else.
Ricardo Dal Farra prepared ‘Conciertos Imaginarios’, a playlist consisting of composers and students from Canada and Argentina. The last track was a pearl despite its subject ‘Mosquitoes’ by Joao Fernandes.
‘Interesting to listen to the mosquito work, distanced from health issues that it represents dengue fever, malaria, ross river fever etc.’ ‘Yes but look at the bright side, you can listen the mosquitos music without these diseases :)’
Nicholas Ng and Amber Hansen performed ‘Remembering Chinaman Creek’, a tribute to Chinese Australian heritage, as more than a few creeks are named as such in Australia, after gold miners and market gardeners. Amber and Nicholas used traditional instruments, some drums dipped in water, as well as Chinese chant. They took us on a voyage, allying past and present in their sounds, producing visual ebbs and flows with silk ribbons in an exquisite choreographed improvisation. ‘These two are visual also ..so a plus for them :)’, ‘I can feel a chinese dragon here and now’’, ‘Great choreography’, ‘such a treat’, ‘very evocative’.
Toby Gifford and Simon Linke welcomed us outdoors, under a beautiful blue sky, on the Brisbane river bank. They gave us an insight of the ‘water liveness’ with a hydrophone, ‘fishing sound’. ‘The point of our group is to reconnect with the environment in tangible embodied ways’ said Toby. ‘Audio witness, sound as environmental evidence.’, ‘Excellent!’
The final performance paid homage to rivers across the world, with a live mixed improvisation in NYC – including Joel Chadabe, Tom Beyer, Leah Barclay, field recordings, live percussion and electronics. Leah was commenting ‘the voice you hear now is Lyndon Davis from Gubbi Gubbi country on the Noosa River, Australia. …Now we are at the pamba river in Kerala, South India.’ ‘Travelling’ responded someone in the public. ‘What a wonderful journey!’