Final Year Studio - Research - Julius Popp - Bit.Fall

Video courtesy of chezzorilla at YouTube

The specific peice above was created by German artist Julius Popp and uses water droplets as a medium to then project information onto. Comprising of 128 nozzles, this curtain of conintuous water droplets uses maganetic valves controlled by a computer to display both text and graphics randomly selected from the archive of the Internet.

Although simple in execution this peice of artwork poses a very good question to our perception of objects and information. For centuries information in books wasn't perminent, the books could be damaged or just decay, paper without certain measures could not last forever. Popp with the temporal espect of the water droplets here shows us that. Words displayed by the peice are only viewable for a second, unlike our new digital mediums such as the Internet where information can occupy cyberspace, if untouched, forever, even when your computer or everybody elses has gone to scrapyard. This then poses a question of selection, just think in thousands of years time, future civilisations will not have to dig holes to see how we live but simply logon to an historical archive of past webpages.

All our triumphs and tradegies as a species can and will be criticised so that lessons will be learnt and mistakes avoided. For exmple as a western world the shear access to horrific images of the second world war as made us have the longest period in histroy where there hasn't been a war of some kind in europe.