Nico Delort

Edition 1: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussischer Kultur-besitz, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

Edition 2: Kramlich Collection, San Francisco

In a darkened space, a copper pipe runs down from the ceiling, terminating in a small brass valve, from which a single drop of water is slowly emerging. A live color video camera, fitted with a special lens attachment used for extreme close- up magnification, is focused in on this drop. The camera is connected to a video projector that displays the swelling drop of water on a large screen at the rear of the space. The optical properties of the waterdrop cause it to act like a wide-angle lens, revealing an image of a room and those within it. The drop grows in size gradually, swelling in surface tension, until it fills the screen. Suddenly it falls out of the picture and a loud, resonant sound is heard as it lands on an amplified drum. Then, in an endless cycle of repetition, a new drop begins to emerge and again fill the screen.

The simultaneous scales represented in the live video/water system draw a connection to the traditional philosophy or belief that everything on the higher order of existence reflects, and is contained in, the manifestation and operation of the lower orders. This idea has been expressed in ancient religious terms as the symbolic correspondence of the mundane (the earth) and the divine (the heavens), and is also represented in the theories of contemporary physics that describe how each particle of matter in space contains knowledge or information about the entire system.