Metaqua | object design, short video, interactive installation

Interactive installation, part of the group exhibition, including Heatherwick Studio. Installation works by touching what appears a dark screen, but it is still water and once touched the abstract video loop is triggered. As a mesmerising installation Metaqua seduces the viewer to enter, experience it through touch, moving image, look into the alternative model of reality and reflect on what current visual communication systems offer and how they form our day to day lives.
With contributions by:
Jaap de Matt, coding
Ricky from RCA the workshops, following my drawings and making a safe multiple drawer plinth with a door.

Metaqua is a fictional investigation into possibilities of what visual communication mediums might be. Here water is introduced as a new medium for visual communication. That world is Metaqua, meaning “beyond water”. Gilles Deleuze has argued that ‘Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, what is "rational" is the way people pursue those interests and attempt to realise them’. *

Initially, I was fascinated by the real fact that scientists have found that water has memory; for example, heated water does not freeze straight away. Secondly, water is found globally, so could it become recontextualised as the substance of global visual language? The cycles of water somewhat resemble the flow of information. A droplet, a fast river and then the ocean…
The slow experience of installation raises questions about how Metaqua world is designed and in turn audience may feel like reflecting on how the current world is designed, between individuals, countries and overall global systems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
*Five Deleuzian Concepts, Essays on Deleuze, by Daniel W. Smith, Edinburg University Press, 2012.