Finding Water: The Machine of Awesome Bright Liquid Blueness

The Machine of Awesome Bright Liquid Blueness project investigates the ideas of convenience, fashion and entertainment as they relate to a specific community’s choice around drinking water. A hybrid of participatory and dialogical art practices incorporating an interactive sculpture along with the artist performing direct community outreach is the foundation of what the artist refers to as a performance sculpture. A performance sculpture utilizes an interactive sculptural apparatus as an activation or focusing point within a larger community engagement project. The process of directly recruiting, consulting, and collaborating with community partners is a key part of a performance sculpture. Projects work to combine both art product and process in order to facilitate a public through emblematic, supportive, and participatory means. Guided by a migration of educational methods and socially engaged art practices, a performance sculpture is multimodal in its strategy. Its projects operate with five root concerns: examining how art and a communal experience actually operate in everyday life; speaking a language that everyday people can understand; existing in a public space; instigating a collective action; and creating ubiquity and embracing popular methods of cultural production. The level and amount of these concerns will vary from project to project and audience to audience.