WHEN IT RAINS
Feb 2008


When it rains, buildings become specially angled surfaces for directing liquid flow. The roof is a slicing machine cutting the deluge in two. The gradual tilt of the roof filters the milimitre thin water down either side.
Glistening screens that seem constant but are really a perpetual re-working, shimmer like silk-worms. Rain descends and is replenished from above.

The water gathers and pools in the guttering running alongside the roof, then rushes on until a bend in the pipe creates a slowing. This sends the water into a spiralling of counter-directions that builds into a pressure until the vacume in the drainpipe pulls the water downwards. It now runs down the piping, the length of the entire building and out the gutter.

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Attaching a water-butt to the side of a building is an act of sabotage. The device that redirects water into the water butt is a jamming device inserted into the deliberately cut ends of this final length of vertical piping. The water redirection device holds one end of the cut pipe on tiny plinths that prevent it from making a matching connection to this inserted device and then introduces a tapered channel built inside the wider diameter of the other end. What this means is that when a torrent of water courses down the piping, some of this water falls into a vacumed overspill area between the original piping and the narrowed insertion. It then bounces out of that holding area as an organized overflow and is forced down a seperate and much narrower feed-pipe that ends as a side-incision into the barrel of the water butt.

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This discussion is intended as a way of speaking about how systems lend themselves to one another, converting or subverting usage from one domain of operation into another.
I would argue that this system of organized deviation or the capitalization of “spillage”, happens at every instant and in every category of seperation; of people, of communities, of States, of neurological zones, questioning how we draw boundaries and more interestingly how these boundaries or limits are put to use, in a series of spiralling pressure-points that are what drives things on and makes then what they are. This driving on not only cuts blatantly through any idea of contained “Place” but uses the very restrictions of endings, border and boundaries as a kind of compression pump where restriction and expansion are played into a complex and responsive syntax of movement, delay and counter-movement.(1)


To hold, grasp, encounter this syntax is like trying to hold the wind. It is a system of asymmetrical velocities and the intersection points and cross-currents that these give rise to are what gives us the windy day. Ultimately however it is our experience of that windy day as the currents intersect on the surface of our body, that makes it recognizeable to us. How we are placed and the way we modify that alignment as the wind plays out its course across our face is how the wind comes into operation for us on that day. Our skin is the litmus paper to the windy day just as the surface of the building records, interprets and affects the passage of the rain. As time goes on our features are engraved with these currents that build up like sediments just as if we were a piece of land onto which could be read the weather fronts of passing years. Through constant observation and surveilance from afar the dynamic trends that are “us” are hardened into facts and the landscape turns to Atlas. Who holds the Atlas in their hands depends on who holds the power of this distant gaze but has this any relationship at all with the man and the wind?
(Preamble to an essay)