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Untitled, Graphite on 20" X 30" Paper, Gregory Beck Rubin, November 2007 The drawing is a composite image of the different parts of Du Still as it was in Montreal while the machine was active. Steam pours out of the wands, and condensed water drips into the recepticles or forms a puddle on the mylar platforms. They are the states of change of water in Du Still.
Artist Bill Viola presented this piece, Ocean Without A Shore , at the 2007 Venice Biennale , surrounded by water, no doubt. And though Venice feels endless on its floating deck, and endless in the maze of streets twisting themselves into undo-able knots, or endlessness in the Arsenale Hall, imposing & monumental like a cave of wonders, there is so much that is tactile and tectonic in the water's performs in Viola's work. The transformation of our awareness of water first aurally than visual is an important place to begin relating my own observer/machine relationship problems to the Viola's work. The observer of the video is also an activator, and is integral to the observer's understanding of his space, and the systems generating that kind of space: a waterfall wall delineating two worlds. When a person passes through the water, its being becomes known to us because it is broken by the form of the body. Touching. I like this idea of touching and activating. I can pinpoint to the water's finiteness when it comes into contact with my body.H2O and the Waters of Forgetfullness . Beautiful Essays. The essays have helped clarify for me the question of the Machine's purpose. Du Still belongs to the underworld infrastructure of sewage and water treatment systems, of the modern conditioning of water and how it enters and behaves in our cities, and in our homes, between the walls, in the plumbing systems. An infrastructure tied up with nature and the potential of nature to demonstrate the fragility of our inconsiderate architecture (to borrow a term from Illich and reverse it), the disparity between the way we imagine the landscape of the city and the physical reality of the city. We are ashamed of what water carries though out modern cities, and we bury this shame. We are ashamed of a part of ourselves and we flush it down into the waters coursing through our homes, but then secretly these discarded parts of ourselves are mingled with the other discarded parts of other city dwellers. Where do they go? What do they do, individually and collectively? What does water, in its various states, do with these real and imaginary parts of ourselves, of our imagination? How does water impregnate imagination into architecture?
