PIXEL POLES

proposal for Ketchikan, Alaska rain gauge, 2013

With this public artwork we aim to foster the ritual of recording the yearly precipitation, to represent this data physically and to turn the marking of the precipitation of each new year into a community event. The work is composed of 5” tall powder-coated metal rings, each representing 5” of fallen rain, resulting in a sculpture that is a 1:1 representation of the measured water. The rings are stacked in columns representing the yearly precipitation over the past 100 years, and these in turn are arranged in a puddle-like shape. Thus each pole is a representation of the recorded rain, and it will further carry the information for the next century’s data, for example the same pole will have the years 1913, 2013 and 2113 marked on it. Every year, as the recorded rainfall accrues there will be a mobile gauge that can be lifted by the staff to mark the current level. In this sense the artwork is a visualization of the historical data and a means of recording of the present and future rainfall.