charity water + josh spear’s birthday.

My friend and one of the original kings of design/art blogging, Josh Spear, just turned 25. Instead of gifts, he turned his blog spotlight on one of my favourite causes: charity: water.

The movement to make fresh, clean water available around the world is near to my heart. When I was in South Africa recently I saw just what a vital tool a village well can be. Seeing people travel huge distances to carry clean water home (usually in large jugs balanced on their heads) was eye-catching, but more so was hearing about just how vital one well can be for hundreds of people. To see such gratitude over something we take completely for granted each time we turn on a tap completely changed the way I look at some of life’s fundamental needs.

The math isn’t hard to understand: A $20 donation can give one person clean water for 20 years. 1.8 billion people around the world don’t have access to safe water. That’s 1 in 6 human beings on the planet. For Josh’s birthday, he’s gunning to raise $5000 to create a well that will deliver fresh water to 250 people for 20 years.

I donated. You can too, by clicking right here. Plus, this gives us another reason to watch charity: water’s excellent 2008 PSA supported by Jennifer Connelly:

james cooper.

Water is both a lucid dream and a contradictory nightmare.

Despite our evolution, it’s a place we’re no longer allowed to be. Comprised of it, our very bodies draw us toward it;  the water in our cells and the water of the world are like magnets constantly reaching out to each other. Life-sustaining and essential, we can’t live without water but despite our desire we aren’t allowed to live within in either. It beckons us but will just as easily, without thought, drown us. It promises everything yet assures us of nothing.

Viscous and prismatic, we are visually enthralled by its sights and sounds and within its heights and depths we can have an experience as close to flight as anything an unaided human will ever know. Though never far from our minds we know that this buoyancy can shift to prison without warning. Water is false freedom, and we are inevitably ether moored within it forever or expelled out. We may only visit. The moment you let yourself think only of its wonder is when you must immediately remind yourself of its treachery. Or you will die.

I’ve found photos that capture these thoughts. James Cooper’s amazing photos reflect every mood of water: beauty, deceit, abandon, hindrance, effulgence, release, life, and death. They are superb in every sense.

Via Tiny Vices

irena salina: flow.

I stopped buying bottled water about 9 months ago, after discovering a website called Tappening. Luckily for me, I live in a city, Toronto, and a country, Canada, with an abundance of water and quality control infrastructure to keep it clean and safe. Not everyone is in the same boat.

In her documentary film “Flow”, director Irena Salina looks into the evils of the bottled water industry and the global water crisis. It’s playing the festival circuit right now, and hopefully will be shown in more cities towards the end of the year. I can’t wait to see it.

julius popp: bit.fall.

German-born artist Julius Popp is the man behind “bit.fall” – a machine that controls falling streams and drips of water to create beautiful, and incredibly temporary, words and images. The same technology behind the whole Jeep Waterfall that made waves (I couldn’t resist…) at autoshows in 2007, I like this work better because it’s aim is cultural, not commercial. bit.fall scans the internet and randomly pulls the most popular words, turns them into water, and drops them. It’s almost like aquatic data visualization. Described by Popp himself as a “metaphor for the incessant flood of information we are exposed to”, the end result is just incredibly beautiful.

If you’re interested in how the whole thing works, then check out this interview with Popp.

Via Pan-Dan