Eyebeam Art + Technology Center
540 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through August 11, free, 12 noon – 6:00
212-937-6580
eyebeam.org
Part of this year’s World Science Festival, “Surface Tension: The Future of Water” takes a playful yet serious look at the natural elixir of life. Running through August 11 at Eyebeam, the interactive exhibit features installations by engineers, artists, scientists, and others that examine H2O from a multitude of different angles. Hal Watts’s “Bottled Waste” asks visitors to turn a crank to feel how much energy is needed to fill a liter of water. Kieren Jones, Alexander Groves, and Azusa Murakami examine the growing levels of plastic garbage in the ocean in “The Sea Chair Project.” David Bowen’s “Tele-Present Water” is a hanging sculpture that creates waves based on weather patterns experienced by a data buoy station adrift in the Pacific. Di Mainstone, Louis McCallum, Nanda Khaorapapong, Richard Shed, and David Gauthier’s “Hydrocordion” encourages people to make music by manipulating water in cylindrical aqua flutes using their hands and feet. Ralph Borland reveals that the highly praised PlayPump project, in which children in developing countries participate in pumping drinkable water, does not work quite as well as promised in “The Problem with the PlayPump.” Fergal McCarthy re-creates the 1968 Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer, based on a John Cheever story about a man who makes his way through a Connecticut community by swimming in private backyard pools, by making his way through Dublin using private and public pools, rivers, seas, and canals. The most spectacular installation is Julius Popp’s “BIT.FALL” (seen in slow motion in the above video), in which free-falling water forms words that are being sourced live from the internet, a pixelated waterfall of digital information that is visible only for a few seconds. “Surface Tension” is an intriguing and enlightening exhibition that focuses not only on the many uses of water but the challenges faced by those who need it so desperately.