The Village of Living Water
This piece aims to explore symbiotic relationships found in nature, as well as trickle down effects and emergent properties of ecologies. The piece is inspired by the small village of Harie in Japan, where spring water flows into the town from the mountains. The residents each have a shed outdoors in which they wash vegetables and clean plates. Koi in these sheds eat the scraps and purify the water which then runs down onto the rice crops. This village, nicknamed “The Village of Living Water” symbolises a very special relationship that humans have with nature, and water in particular, as it is a very rare and endangered practice which we could all learn from. I wanted to explore our relationship with water in a tactile way, by using water as an input method to Max, and seeding various events within the computer program with the live data.