This image shows only 1/15 of the width of the entire wall

Limited Edition 2005 - 10
A public artwork for the new Brightwater Treatment System outside of Seattle WA.

Commissioned by 4Culture. To be installed in 2010.

I will make a limited edition of 150,000 one-inch golden tiles. The limited edition is exactly the number of tiles that will cover the center of the long wall of the Primary Clarifiers Building. This huge wall will have a metal grid with a pattern of one-inch holes, and each of these spaces on the wall will be capable of holding one tile. The faucet will be placed at the beginning of the wall. There may be a number-counter on the faucet, too, so that visitors are aware of how many tiles are gone and how many are left.

There are daily supervised tours of the plant, often for schoolchildren. When each visitor turns the valve and gets a golden tile (only one per visitor on the tour), there is a choice. The person can take the tile home, or can attach it to one of the spaces on the wall. Neither choice is wrong. There will be something seductive about keeping the tile-- it's pretty; it's a memory of the visit. And there is something seductive about putting it on the wall -- you can choose any location; by putting it on the wall with the other tiles that are there, you will be making your mark within a community; you will be adding to the tiles on the wall that change every day, contributing to a generative pool.

If 30,000 people visit the piece each year as predicted, it will take 5 years for the limited edition to run out. After that, the tiles that were recycled to the wall can be taken down, put back into the vertical pipeline that leads to the faucet, which will then dispense those tiles again. Assuming half the tiles were taken home and half the tiles are on the wall, there will be 2.5 more years, then 1.25 years, etc. making the piece have an interactive life of approximately 10 years. The piece has a life-span, as do our natural resources. The shortest life-span it could have, if not a single person puts their tile on the wall, is 5 years. There's no guessing what its longest life-span is.

Background
The Master Plan artists for Brightwater named the area of the treatment process, The Street of Alchemy, referring to the transformation of human waste into clean water. When I began reading psychoanalytic literature about human waste, I came across the metaphor of gold: Freud connects excrement to gold or money, especially in dreams. This strange concidence inspired me to use gold -- our fascination with it, our greed for it -- in this work about the value and the finite nature of our natural resources.

I began thinking about making a piece for one person at a time to experience, an interactive work that wasn't media-based, but instead mechanical, very physical, materially digital, and unpredictably generative -- a piece that slowly grows and transforms in relation to the number of visitors to Brightwater and each visitor's choice. One challenge was to make a piece that also takes into account the enormous spaces at Brightwater by linking the intimate experience to a large, beautiful, and dramatic presence.

Public Art Coordinator: Cath Brunner

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