It is an extention of the intended abilities of an electronic part - the Qprox touch sensor - to utilize flowing water as the electrode (the “button”) in a touch circuit.

It is built as an intentional challenge to a taboo-level element of popular fear:

Water + Electricity = Bad

My Sensitive Fluids seeks to confront the popular concept of electricity - wrought with fears both rational and irrational- with an overt display of water and electricity working together in an environment that is intentionally designed to attract touch. The sculpture is a challenge to our assumption and faith that what is designed for us is designed to be good for us. In the tradition of Richard Serra’s “Prop Sculptures”, it is a display of a known danger in a situation in which our safety is taken for granted.

Water and electricit independently operate on various levels in our minds simultaneously. Each is beneficial and dangerous. Each is necessary to our survival as a species, as a culture, and likely as an individual. Water is essential to the function of our civilization as a means of transportation, waste disposal and in a reasonably clean form; as a basic, essential element of life. Electricity is a part of nearly every experience of human life in the western world, yet is largely not understood and even considered to be not understandable by it's users. This is due at least in part to the need for faith in something whose effects can be witnessed, though the thing itself - electricity - cannot.

Curiosity and an overly developed desire to chellenge popular belief lead me to this project. I suppose this must also be coupled with an ongoing pursuit of the defining elements of life:the things that make us tick. Why do we choose to live, procreate and fight the inevitibility of death? These core elements are the things that make human work retain meaning, remain valuable. We're all trying our luck at imortality.

I have been building since before I can even remember, and making sculpture since at least 1990. I have always been interested in motion, particularly as a way of bringing art into our plane of existence, operating in the same sense of time in which we operate. Coming to ITP was a natural step, and thankfully, I was able to take it.

Motion tends to create an acceleration of the natural tendency toward entropy. I mean things that move wear out - they have a life cycle much like our own. This is an idea that I've had to try to overcome as a central consideration of many of my past jobs, and I suppose the challenge of this problem - and its inevitable failure - were the things that attracted my interest in the first place. It is becoming more important as an aspect of my work as I feel my own body beginning the long (hopefully) process toward it's own entropy.

Water is wonderful in its ability to circumvent this problem. Motion is its essence. Its molecules aren't aligned in any structure to wear out. I had been thinking for some time about using water in sculpture, but hadn't the knowledge or experience to go about tackling the problems. But when I started working with QProx (touch) sensors in my second semester at ITP and realized that anything that can hold a charge can be used as a sensor, water leapt to mind.

I am particularly interested in reaching the contemporary art viewer, but would love to be able to attract the interest of people beyond that sphere. I think my idea is a fun one, and can be experienced on many levels. If one just wants to play in the water, that can be done. If it's about the odd form, or the visual references I've tried to make, or some greater metaphor that the work might suggest; the viewer's experience is the viewer's and I would no more want to change that than I would have success in attempting such a feat.

THis isn't strictly time based, outside of the normal rhythms of the cycling water. There is always some circulation of water in the piece, but there are three vessels hanging above a shallow pool of water that are each sensitive to touch. Touching one of the vessels temporarily increases the flow of water to that vessel. A sustained touch eventially - after a few seconds - stops having an effect on the flow. It's the action that causes a reaction (as for the same being equal and opposite remains to be seen).

Much of the process of making this sculpture was solving problems that came up. What do I build with that will be waterproof, yet light enough to transport? How do I go about separating the water and electricity and otherwise ensure the safety of the piece? How do I control the flow of the water without overwhelming the viewer with crazy mechanical components that have nothing to do with the idea of the piece? How can I afford to do this?

Ensuring the safety of using water and electricity together posed the greatest challenge in the project, and is still at the time of this writing of concern to me, as the system has not yet been tested in its full form. It is for this reason alone that I have not submitted it for inclusion in the Spring Show. I would like to test it fully before exhibiting the work publicly. My approach to answering this issue is three-fold. First, I used components designed for the purpose of working in wet environments. The water pump was of the greatest concern to me in designing this piece, and the pump used is one designed for full-immersion use in an artificial pond. Components not designed for immersion, but which were required by the design of the piece to be within easy access of the viewer - such as the solenoid valves controlling the flow of the water - are both elevated to the highest position in the piece where they are then least likely to be the subject of accidental splashing, and are sealed by rubber sleeves cast especially for the purpose.

The second line of defense is separation, already touched upon in the case of the solenoid valves. All of the components that do not directly interact with the water are kept as separate from the water as possible. One thing I have learned from past experience is that water finds its way into all those places you don't want it to go. I cast rubber gaskets into the seam of the sculpture, borrowed a technique I've learned from electricians of looping exposed cables below their final destination before disappearing into an enclosure. This way, should water somehow drip down the cable, it gathers and drips off rather than finding its way into the enclosure. I used gravity here to every advantage I could come up with. Where cables must make the transition from the wet area of the sculpture into the structure surrounding that area, they do so be ascending up into the enclosure. Furthermore, cable runs built into the foam structure leave those enclosures from the top, and then loop down toward their final destination.

The third line of defense is the GCFI outlet, the same kind required by law to be used within five feet of any water source in the home. This apparatus monitors the electricity flowing through its circuitry and shuts the circuit off if it finds that the amount of electricity entering the circuit does not match the amount leaving the circuit, indicating that some of it is going where it shouldn't. All of this happens within five miliseconds.

I am still working on this layered protection, and will continue to try to improve it.

The next problem, that of building it, took a combination of approaches. I had to make the main structure separable into two parts so that it could be more easily transported from my house in Queens to ITP (and anyway, it provided a nice challenge). I learned to think through the life cycle of a piece while designing and building exhibits for the Children's Museum of Manhattan. If I didn't think through every phase of it's existence, from idea to fabrication to installation, repair, transportation and eventual destruction, the part I hadn't thought through always came back to haunt me. In this case, I knew I couldn't afford to rent a truck to bring it back and fourth, particularly if I intended to show it after ITP, so I made it a 'kit'. This idea ended up running the show, however. Once I had settled on a two-part construction I had more water-proofing issues to contend with, greater concerns in running cable paths and water conduits. This changes everything, as they say. I was also intent on preserving my wonky asthetic. Having to be able to pull it apart didn't help this.

The base is made of plywood, as are the connection surfaces at the separation point. This structure rests on tripod legs made from... a camera tripod that had been taken apart and left in the recycling area at ITP. Some would call me cheap, but I prefer innovative:)

The actual form of the sculpture is made of household insulation foam (left over from renovation on my own house). This foam I formed partly through a rather complicated assembly process similar to that of wine cask construction, and partly through an additive, reductive process of adding layers of foam and then carving them back down to the form I intended.

Over this plywood and foam structure is the main element of the construction: a skin of polyester fabric impregnated with urethane, similar to - but much more friendly to work with than - fiberglass (glass fiber cloth impregnated with polyester resin). The advantages to this were that the materials were able to be formed into the types of forms I intended, were reasonably inexpensive, accessible, easy to work with, had the strength characteristics I needed for this project, offered good fire resistance and water resistance, didn't require outrageous handling proceedures, and wouldn't turn my house into an EPA Brown Zone. All in all, this turned out pretty well, though the whole process took (and is still taking) more time than I had planned.

The other elements of the project include the water basin suspended at the top of the sculpture, and the smaller hanging vessels. The basin was cast in a mold that I designed to rotate as well as change it's angle with respect to the ground so that the resin I was casting with, which starts as two low-viscosity liquid components and hardens about twenty minutes after mixing the two, would be able to continually move over the entire interior surface of the mold while the resin was curing. The hanging vessels created by selectively heating the surface of common 500ml plastic water bottles with a propane torch. Once the desired shapes had been achieved, I decorated the surfaces with pigmented urethane resin while the bottles rotated in a drill chuck, similar to glass blowing techniques I had observed in art school and elsewhere.

The only other fabrication that required a significant level of research and experience is the tubing that does the job of getting the water up to the main basin. The tubing is common 1/2" copper water pipe. The only caveat is that the pipe comes in a work-hardened state, which cannot be bent by any simple means without collapsing the structure of the tube. To overcome this problem, I had to anneal the tubing; that is, I heat the tubing to a glowing red heat and then immediately quenched, or rapidly cooled, it in water. This process is different depending on the metal you're treating, and in fact, the same process hardens steel. In this case, however, I ended up with a soft and pliable tube, of which I then packed with sand before capping the ends. This is apparently the same technique used by brass instrument makers, which is where I learned of it. The sand helps to keep the tubing from collapsing (flattening the roundness of the tube) as it is bent. I had to go through the process twice before I got it right as the first time I did not anneal the tubing uniformly, creating a tendency for the tube to bend more easily in the softer areas.

The greatest discovery I think I have made is that I chose a whopper of a challenge! I knew this would be interesting and challenging and difficult, while being fun and hopefully enticing the viewer with the perception of a risk that is significantly greater than the actual risk, itself. I have done a fair amount of electrical work with some of it being in the range of several hundred volts AC with amperages exceeding 100 amps, and have always found the experience unnerving (as it probably should be). But I have to admit that when I began this project I started with the assumption that most people's perception of the danger of electricity has very little to do with the real dangers of electricity. In my own experiences when I started working with wiring outlets at a former job, I was nervous touching the wires, even though I knew that I had turned the power off, and in some cases had even disconnected it! Somehow I could not separate the knowledge of the intended purpose of the wires from the physical reality I knew to be true. I sometimes had to check the panel several times to reassure myself.

With a bit more knowledge and experience under my belt I felt very little respect for those misplaced fears. The process of making this piece, and of planning out every detail I could imagine, has made me reconsider my prideful distain and realize that if I get it wrong, I could potentially kill someone. I compared this piece earlier to Serra's prop sculpture. It's important to remember that one of his sculptures seriously hurt someone.