speaks louder than a thousand words. Seeing a plant dying in slow motion from polluted tap water means more than all the state water reports. My work exposes the reality of the water crisis on a visceral level.
Mattias Lundberg is a Swedish 3D printing specialist. In collaboration with him, I made GE Water Bottle. The water bottle is in the form of a 1950s GE Hudson Falls capacitor. The project consists of designing and producing bottles, filling them with tap water from Hudson Falls, and mailing them to the GE headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza at Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is reminiscent of a corporate practice during the 1950s of rewarding GE staff and workers with capacitor souvenirs with their names on them. The bottles will remind GE about the poisoned drinking water in Hudson Falls and down the river and about the thousands of people dying of cancer caused by water pollutants. Influences on My Work Drawing on Italian Neorealism, Soviet film directors Andrei Tarkovsky in Stalker and Mirror and Sergei Parajanov in The Color of Pomegranates used moving images to make a statement about water. They utilized associative visual thinking to tell a convincing story featuring everyday subjects. In 1993, Erin Brockovich built a case against the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) involving groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California. She helped 600 residents achieve a 333 M settlement with PG&E in a lawsuit that was the first of its kind. My work is a similar way of defending my ground. Marcel Duchamp and Ryan Gander both incorporated any object necessary to express their de- sired form. They used form and material as their subject matter. Luc Montagnier conducted research on water memory, which he defined as the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances previously dissolved in it. The Soviet Communism of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the Cuban socialism of the ‘80s taught me the difference between true and not true. I was born and raised in a Soviet-type communist dictatorship where truth was a secret and every social statement was a manipulation. Laura Splan created scientific software applications in art and used generic materials and pro- cesses. Mary Mattingly made sculptural ecosystems in urban spaces as a form of community-based art. Aloïs Yang investigated perceptions of time and space related to water. Claudia Luna Fuentes also explored the relationship between people and water. Mark Lombardi created drawings that document alleged financial and political fraud by power bro- kers, and in general, “the uses and abuses of power.” These works uncover the patterns in everyday events.
Collaborators While researching for evidence of possible solutions to water contamination, I reached out to Simon Teat at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. He and the lab of Professor Jing Li at Rutgers created a crystal that removes 99% of the heavy metals from water. Using a small part of the modeling software produced by the Berkeley lab and the crystal molecule, I created digital images and video representations of the purification of the contaminated water (see https://youtu.be/iQPOyjN- 48Rc). I named the crystal Absorbsin, a compound word combining “absorbing” and “sin.” Looking for full access to the software application (named Mercury), I contacted the developer, the Cambridge Crys- tallographic Data Centre (CCDC), based in Cambridge, U.K. The IT specialists at the CCDC helped me understand how to acquire and use the software. During this process, I contacted Rutgers University and collaborated with Elizabeth Demaray, a professor of fine art. Our teamwork led to a presentation of the Absorbsin project with Simon Teat and Ever Velasco from the lab of Professor Jing Li. The scientists and I explained to the students of Professor Demaray that the LMOCf/Absorbsin functions to clean heavy metals from water. The full presentation can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOEk- n7OADA&t=20s. It was interesting for me to explore the crystal as a structure and visualize its function. To my understanding and that of the scientists as well, we have the tools to purify and maintain water quality, but due to economic reasons (i.e., it is not profitable), it is not happening. Another collaborator in the Absorbsin project was Asegun S. Henry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He invented a method for the sonification12 of chemical structures. I sent him the crystal’s formula, C38 H22 N2 O5 Zn, and asked him to transform it into sound. Then, in collaboration with the composer Jorge Sosa, we created a musical piece representing the moment of water purification, “The Hidden Garden” (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYMIOfCG3s).
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