Vortex

Taxiing up to the new Canberra airport, I wasn’t in much of a hurry.

I didn’t have a ticket. My plan was to buy one there.

So you can imagine that I had all the time in the world to chase butterflies.

Or in this case get very distracted by the water sculptures.

Jumping to the end of the story, there are two water sculptures at the Canberra airport by William Pye.

William has spent his life doing high end water sculptures, aka fountains.

The one at Canberra is a doozy . Well, there’s two of them. They are both doozies.

It (the one I focused on) is a large man-sized glass cylinder overflowing with water. The excess water runs down the outside to the bottom of the cylinder where it is captured and recycled.

What makes it fascinating is that the cylinder also has a full vortex on the inside.

This must work by having a pump inside sucking out the water at the middle of the bottom of the cylinder and then recycling this water into the cylinder so it’s volume-neutral.

And then there must also be a secondary pump slowly pushing water into the cylinder thereby forcing water over the top edge of the cylinder, down the outside into the drain for recycling.

The effect was very compelling to this scientist. I stood up on the plinth to get a closer look and a few photos.

And of course that alerted security, two and half (the dog) of whom promptly came to see what style of terrorism I was engaging in.

To be fair on them, I was awfully tempted to put something into the vortex to see what would happen. I can count a number of such curiosity-driven disasters in my lifetime.

Eventually I talked myself out of incarceration, liberally quoting my interest in the arts.

In the end I suspect that they just wanted to get rid of me.

It was lucky that I didn’t have a ticket or I would have missed that plane.

Afterwards I researched the subject and found out the sculptor was William Pye and his website shows his efforts all around the world. http://www.williampye.com/

For his next effort I think he should simulate a water spout. Now wouldn’t that be a sculpture and a half; a nice mill pond in the terminal (say 10 feet across) with a working water spout above it.

Apparently water spouts don’t suck up water – they are small and weak rotating columns of air over water. Effectively they are whirling columns of air and water mist formed when the right conditions apply; the right cloud type and temperature, the right ocean temperature, the right wind conditions, the right proximity of the clouds to the ocean, and the right atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity.

From what I see on the internet it seems that they are not fully understood and scientists are just starting to numerically model the buggers. A good opportunity for an artist to jump the gun I reckon.

I just emailed William this idea; watch this space.