Avalanche

Avalanche is a product and performance by the Institute for New Feeling, an artist collective including Scott Andrew, Nina Sarnelle, and Agnes Bolt.

Avalanche is an enhanced water beverage filtered through a human pipeline that traces the flow of water through a city and through the body. A live performance presents municipal water usage as a literal concert of bodies, a system that is improbable, arduous, and flawed. The Avalanche bottling process begins with an ice cap harvested from the Never Summer Mountain Range. The ice melts and travels through a series of human filters, eventually collecting in crystal singing bowls. The sound of this filtration is performed as a concert for a live audience, while at the same time being live broadcast back to the mountain range, causing an avalanche from the vibration of sound waves. The avalanche is bottled for consumption, while also providing new ice to begin the process again.

The project consists of a one night live performance, multi-channel video and vending machine stocked with Avalanche water, all of which work together to create a mythology of the product’s “source.” Passing water between the city and the mountain in an endless feedback loop, IfNf's filtration process equates the mountain spring with the trickle of water across a dirty windshield, the tears of two middle-aged men, the gargle and spit from a teenager’s mouth—juxtaposing trivial everyday gestures with the looming, dark future of a changing climate.

Black Cube