2007 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

The Well is a live reflection of our culture. Our contemporary.life is translated into a colorful grid of text and numbers taken from different information sources,and projected inside of a large scale (~10' diameter) well structure filled with water. The text is written from four directions in four different languages; live textual information feeds that are pulled over the Internet from the local news (English written from left to right), paragraphs from the bible (in Hebrew - written from right to left), Japanese Zen stories (in Japanese -write from top to bottom), and real-time numbers from the stocks exchange in NYC (written from bottom to top). This textual grid is generated in real-time by software code and it creates a rich topography of our knowledge and coexistence. It mixes languages, traditions, codes, and direction. It brings to play oppositions of old and new, holy and casual, local and global, organic and technological and brings past, future, and the present together.