THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL DIVINGING STICK Wood, Iron, Custom Electronics.
This artwork explores how the search for water beyond our planet overlaps with our pseudoscientific search for water on Earth. The artwork includes a dowsing stick suspended inside a set of rotating interlocked gimbal rings.
Water divining, or dowsing, is a pseudoscientific method of finding water, often involving a Y-shaped stick that is believed to guide its wielder towards underground sources of water. Even today, many regional Australians use water divining as a trusted method of finding water.
Another area where finding water is of high interest is the search for biomarkers space. A planet able to host liquid water is a prerequisite for biological life as we know it. An array of different methods are applied to see if an exoplanet might have water and in the last 20 years, thousands of exoplanets in distant star systems have been identified as such.
A locally sourced Divining Stick is suspended inside three joined gimbal rings, allowing it to turn 360 degrees around three axes. This means that it can rotate and point in any direction. The rings are spun by a DC motor that will start and stop intermittently.
After about a minute of spinning the stick slows down and eventually comes to a halt, pointing in a seemingly random direction for a few seconds, just to unsettle and start moving again. The search continues.
On a small wall-mounted screen possible extraterrestrial sources of water the stick points to are displayed in real-time.
This can be done by (a) calculating the position of these exoplanets in relation to the location of the gallery and the time of day, which is done with an Arduino computer chip and (b) tracking the angle of the stick in real-time using a magnetometer (a small sensor able to measure angles over 3 axes). Hence, each time the stick stops we can determine if it points to an actual exoplanet that we believe could have water, and if so, display its name, distance and celestial coordinates.
It will stand at about 1.8m tall and 1m wide and deep and made out of metal. The divining stick itself will be sourced from within close proximity to the exhibiting venue.
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Locally collected dowsing stick, arduino, DC motor, lcd screen
