In yesterday's post we remembered some fun vintage bathing caps, so let's jump in the water today for a brief exploration of the shape of water or of the shapes that water can create.
Nature offers us the most inspiring patterns, designs and structures, many of them forming unexpected geometries. Water to our eyes is a fluid, yet it does have a shape: you may think about the inifinitely different snowflakes, all based on the hexagon, but the reason why we can talk about water and geometry is the structure of its molecule.
Liquid water consists of an interconnected network with water molecules acting as the network's components, connected to one another via hydrogen bonds. The water molecule has a distorted tetrahedral geometry.
Yet we're not here to talk about the geometries of molecules, but at the shapes that water can create: on Monday we looked at Chladni figures and, if you put water under frequencies of sounds and vibrations, you would realise that water creates shapes reminiscent of sacred geometrical patterns.
A while back Linden Gledhill, a Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical biochemist, began experimenting with water and photography (all his experiments suspended between art and science can be admired on his Flickr page; the third and fourth picture in this post are by Gledhill) and started taking pictures of water on a cymascope, a dish of water sitting on a speaker under a microscope.
The vibrations formed patterns on the waves and he focused on capturing the frequencies with a ultra-high-frame-rate camera. The results of his experiments are visually striking and mesmerising with a hallucinatory twist about them and they are also fashionable, as they were reprinted on the garments from Threeasfour's Pre-Fall 2018 collection.
If you think these experiments about the shapes that water can create are too difficult for you, well, create your own shapes with water, like I did underwater a few days ago for another personal project I've been working on. You may not get perfect results, but the fun is guaranteed.
