Water as an optical instrument, on the scale of the landscape
2 instruments :
1. Prism-Aqueduct
For his experiments on light and colours, Newton, faced with the difficulty to fabricate one glass prism without defect, chooses to construct a ' prismatic vase ' filled with water. The water which fills such vase forms a volume optically similar to a glass block of the same dimensions. To use water allows a considerable change of scale. Well-known optic ownership such as refraction or the decomposition of white light is then obvious with the same obviousness as the presence of a rainbow. Prism-aqueduct can technically exist on a very big length : A true aqueduct, on the scale of the landscape : for a system of irrigation, a watering in a park, a garden.
2. Water trough.
I called the second "instrument" Water trough in reference to the text of Genesis. XXX.37-39 : "And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods. And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted." I see in this text an experience of "Natural Magic", how water transforms vision.