Catalogue > At random

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.

The Institute for New Feeling is a collective founded by Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt, and Nina Sarnelle, committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. As a group, our identity is always shifting. Borrowing aesthetics and language from wellness and tech industries, market research, speculative design, political propaganda, we assume a familiar yet fragile voice of authority. IfNf has recently shown work at The Getty Center, LA, Ballroom Marfa, TX, MoMA, NY, Istanbul Modern, Turkey, MAAT, Lisbon, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Hammer Museum LA, Fundacion PROA, Buenos Aires, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Jardin Essential, Bruxelles, Recess, NY, and Mwoods, Beijing. IfNf has been featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.