Water **Whole**: Who wants the other half?

I will preface this post by saying the obvious: everyone needs water to survive. Because everyone drinks water, (sadly not everyone has access to a clean drink of it) it is an almost invisible part of our daily lives. Those who are fortunate enough to live in a place where clean water is plentiful do not have to think about it at all. I am one of those people. But not today.


My project was inspired by the predictions of global water shortage. In the video there are some allusions to this future--the scenes with sand--  The entire video aims to take the ordinary quality of water and make it beautiful. Though this wasn't hard at all since water is beautiful if you just take the time to look at it, which I think is in tune with the way Joseph Beuys talks about art.

The finished piece is silent. I tried and tried and tried and tried to make sound for this piece of video. I found how much the meaning of the piece changed with each new soundscape I created. It all made the piece too heavy handed, and feel too contrived: here's a link to one of my attempts...  I wanted to maintain some transitivity (see page 26 in Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics). On that page Bourriaud mentions a diary entry by Delacroix that read "a successful picture temporarily "condensed" an emotion that it was the duty of the beholder's eye to bring to life and develop."With the soundscapes I created I found that I was in a sense, SHOUTING what the meaning of the piece was.  I wanted to stay away from that because it felt too much like a public service announcement about water shortage--something my original proposal came dangerously close to. In making the video silent I am doing away with all of that heavy handedness and replacing it with a relational aesthetic (something that definitely was not my original intention). The viewers are much more free to create their own meaning, and for those who want to add that meaning to the piece I am inviting other artists, specifically those who work with sound, to make that meaning **whole** through their own creation of a soundscape . I guess Bourriaud would deem this "the aesthetic arena" where a dialogue about the work's meaning can take place. Because as I said earlier, different soundscapes create different meanings for the images. Jean Luc Godard explains that "it takes two to make an image". And I guess for my piece

                              i t  t a k e s  t w o  t o  m a k e  a * * w h o l e * * .



So, who wants to make a soundscape for my VIDEO?