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What Water Wants / The Bowtie
How can we right our relationship with Water? What do we mean we talk about restoring the LA River? In the Summer of 2024, I worked with Clockshop to stage a series of guided listening experiences as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. Over 30-minutes, an audio narration moves between guided meditation and speculative disaster horror and back, evoking multiple perspectives of the river’s history and future, time and space, as if flipping through sonified apertures. The detailed sound design spatially transports listeners across seasons, centuries, and wide swaths of the continent. Composition was designed for spatialized listening to soundtrack the experience of lying by the river, allowing them to experience water’s flows, speeds, and movements across the basin.
You can access the audio here, but I recommend you listen when you are at the river - accessible at Lewis Macadams Park.
Sound design and score by Celia Hollander.
What Water Wants is a mid-point in a trajectory of projects along the Glendale Narrows stretch of the LA River. This work began in 2014 with a trio of interpretive works at a then-vacant parcel of land formerly populated by a railyard. And the next point in the arc will be a permanent artwork at that same site - currently in the process of being transformed into a man-made simulated wetlands by the Nature Conservancy and California State Parks, the Bowtie Wetland Demonstration Project, a three-acre stormwater filtration plant, habitat, and public amenity along the banks of the LA River. Stay tuned until 2027 when the wetlands/artwork will open to the public.
In 2014, Clockshop and the California State Parks System asked me to develop a project for the Bowtie, a 13.5 acre parcel of land adjacent to the Los Angeles River. The Bowtie is owned by the California State Parks, purchased as a preventative measure (with community groups hoping to prevent the site from turning to industrial uses) with the eventual goal of connecting to the Los Angeles River State Park to make a massive 100-acre greenway. In the meantime, the Bowtie appears to the casual viewer as a more or less abandoned post-industrial vacant lot.
The Los Angeles River Signage Program was a set of three connected signage systems that takes visitors through the vacant lot in maps, diagrams, and stories, using the uncanny beauty and mystery of the location as a hook to talk about real-estate speculation, native plant ideology, and water systems, respectively.
The LARSP is now closed to viewers as it transforms into a daylit stormdrain. It will open again in 2027 with a new work by me. In the meantime you can still take the guided audio-walk in your mind.
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