1 | INVESTIGATION [ISLE OF RUM]
Early Greek philosophy was often concerned with how an object could be defined over time. Zeno of Elea was the first to ‘prove’ that movement was an illusion, purely a composite of still moments that together provide the illusion of motion . If time is structured, he said, then motion is impossible. Heraclitus later argued that this temporal permanence is relative, and any moment is in fact an expression of the change that is about to happen- a moving arrow’s direction implies the movement it is about to experience. With this reasoning, he figured that “you cannot step twice into the same stream, for as you step in, other waters are ever flowing onto you”. With this providing an overarching mantra in our work, we were concerned with the way in which we can continuously track water over time, building an ever-clearer understanding
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of how it behaves in relation to other factors, and expressing this interrelationship via a systematic account of the being of the river. Our initial task was to design a means of examining fluid exchanges. The resulting ontological model allowed us to experiment with the effect of gradient and texture on the flow of water across surfaces. Recording these results, we catalogued our findings into an initial taxonomy, a system for classifying the outcomes of each experiment according to characteristics observed, an insight that effectively allowed us to predict the outcomes of future experiments. Previous page and above
An excerpt from the intial taxonomy, showing the results of a simulation of Glen Duian, at the source (2o); results drawn into a density diagram, alongside attachments for measuring other rivers Left
The ontological model