A long time has passed since I first talked with a friend of mine, Solidox, about controlling solenoid valves and building a similar type of installation.
Now for Rokolectiv festival and with the recent media upheaval from the moderncyberwar/diplomaticscandal involving wikileaks i decided to built this version of a liquid text display which would print news feeds from wikileaks. Working like a text scroll that you see on every news tv station.
Just like the real news gets squeezed through lots of different media channels and gets retransmitted, in this installation the text message as it travels through the tubes gets out of sync and looses it shape, ending up looking like an unrecognizable, unreadable never ending line of morse code and the liquids are collected and reused in a loop.
As for the actual build it was somehow tricky. It took more trials and errors than usual. The valves came two days before the festival, without any fittings. I had to solder them to fit in place. Actualy a day before Rokolectiv i had no ideea if it’s going to work. Another falure came from the valve itself, because I forgot to mention to the kind gentleman from automatic.ro, who gave me the valves, that i’m going to use a paraffin-hydrocarbon based fluid. Which affected the valve sealant, the tubes, all silicon and latex rubber, the plastic glue i was using and some of the skin of my hands. . All that got soaked in the oil eventually got fatigued and brittle. I ended up replacing the valve’s sealant with pieces of rubber that was cut from an engine’s fuel intake. I have to thank my brother for this and for all the help.
One of the fist test once everything was in place.
Installing at MNAC with Mizdan, who helped me with the programming. This is just before we realized that the oil was slowly eating the installation from within.
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facem treaba cu lampa! bine?
kristal!