Springs is the first of three video performance installations created for along the Willamette River by Mobile Projection Unit, here with sound design by Crystal Cortez (Quartez). Springs investigates water's universal recognition as a healing bringer of life and vitality and by making its reflective properties central to the installation creates a fully immersive experience. Viewers had the sense of entering a hidden grove or secret eddy in the stream. Performance artists embodied their generational memories of water's powers. Yunuen Rhi was specially commissioned to create a healing ritual along the banks of the Tiajuana River between Mexico and the United States using flowers, pendulums and swords to invoke a spirit of renewal. All of our collaborators at this site were asked to respond to the idea of a hidden spring or headwaters. After the initial prompt performers were given great autonomy over the shape their actions would take.  Other performers were Sophia Wright Emigh, Jaleesa Johnston and Sarah Turner, Sarah Brahim and Yaara Valey, Justin Charles Hoover and Linda K Johnson. Crystal Cortez was commission to create a special score for the project. She chose to transform field recordings from this year's protests in downtown Portland using coding in Max MSP Jitter. Live video mixing and coding in Isadora continually remixed the video to create a "stream of consciousness" at the water’s edge.

Here is a link to Yunuen speaking about that work

Additional participants who also appear at other sites along the river, are Sahra Brahim, Yaara Valey, Jaleesa Johnston, and Sophia Wright Emigh. Sarah Turner and Linda K Johnson also appear in the video at Springs. Digital spells mixing our collaborators' actions with elements of the natural water cycle were made through creative coding by Fernanda D'Agostino and Sarah Turner.







Programming platforms MadMapper and Isadora were used to map moving images at monumental scale on the South Wall of the Portland Art Museum’s Mark building on March 6 2020. With The New Moon the mood for this phase will be introspective, quiet and numinous. Dominated by water imagery and imagery from the science of fluid dynamics this phase turned the courtyard into a processional landscape for participants and viewers of the Portland International Film Festival.






This showing of Nossas Aguas as a work in progress, is part of Mass Residue, an exhibition of women artists working with creative coding, at Art at the Cave gallery in Vancouver, Washington. Sound coding by Crystal Cortez. Both video and audio coding are works in progress. Crystal Cortez will be creating additional interactive sound for Nossas Aguas . In this video are two examples of viewers using the microphone to express themselves. There is also audio of the resonant after echoes of a male voice in a series of texts and songs in Portuguese commissioned for the ultimate exhibition of Nossas Aguas at the Museum of Water in Lisbon, Portugal.





© 2023 Fernanda D'Agostino