A fountain…

…a bit special.

It's located in Japan, at Osaka City Station.

Watching it draw shapes with water, it seems complicated, but in reality, it's no more complex than a printer. Imagine a printer with a single line of nozzles as long as the width of the paper. Then the software simply takes a line of the page and sends a 1 (open) for every black pixel and a 0 (closed) for every white pixel, continuing in this way for all the lines. The software is even simpler than that of a printer. That's it. It's computer art, after all.

There's, however, a more interesting message behind it, and it's the idea that a society must foster and even encourage creativity and art even in its most ordinary manifestations, like a train station or street furniture in general. How long has it been since I saw a contemporary work of art in a station?

Back