The process of finding water

There are two approaches for "opening a source" - the empirical and the metaphysical one, the one where you start digging and the one where you start dancing. In both cases it's a small detail that leads to success: where to dig - and when to dance.

Whenever we entered the mode of water searching groups of people around us started line dancing. Was that just a coincidence?

line dance

To find out, we videotaped the dance and counted the number and the orientation of steps the dancers took.The information that came out of this process looked like a mathmatical riddle, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. But how do you solve that puzzle? All we assumed was that once we found a solution water would flow.

We searched for advise on the Internet:"The most important part to remember is that there is no right way of solving a riddle. Math intensive riddles usually aren't that "math intensive" at all, but use numbers to mislead you. Once again, you have to read between the lines to make sense of what the riddle is asking. Break it down into small chunks so that you can tackle one part of the riddle at a time and avoid completely overwhelming yourself. Look carefully for tricky subject matter. What is the riddle trying to imply? The answer is quite contrary to the implication."(from here)

That's how we started breaking down the code. We looked between the lines. We broke it down into small chunks.

No luck. Time passed.

We returned to the numbers we had subtracted out of the dances and fed this information into a "Turtle graphics" producing computer program called "XLogo". The program produced forms that looked like symbols.

We had come so far. Something needed to make sense now. The people of Oasis seemed to understand. They had built this town to accomodate the landing of their alien friends in the center circle and they were tired of waiting. We showed them our material.The waterless garden in Germany, photos of the dances, the code calligraphy, the turtle graphics. They looked at us and said:

"If the dancing gets too stiff, the rain needs to get dug out as ice cubes"

From there we continued.

Pre-computer turtle graphics had been around since ancient times in all parts of the world. The so called geoglyphs, large drawings on the ground were produced by either arranging stones or by etching into the ground. Some of the most famous ones are the Nazca Lines in Peru, which depict geometric forms and animals. It has been speculated that the geometric icons could indicate the flow of water or be connected to rituals to summon water.

May be our turtle graphics were maps and all we had to do was finding the territory where these maps would fit in? We searched the earth via Satellite and stumbled across Oasis, a town in Nevada. Oasis not only caught our attention because of it's name, but because of it's layout. A straight street was leading off the highway into the desert. The street ended in a large circle. From this circle four streets spiked out, that lead into smaller circles.The layout of the town looked like a turtle graphic.

We booked a flight to Nevada. We missed the plane by 2 minutes. We booked a new flight one day later for double the money and approached the situation on the ground. When we got there the town looked like any other small desert town. A little bit run down. Most people seemedto make their living by selling i-cubes, frozen water crystals which they mined in the nearby mountains. The bigger the icubes, the more expensive they were.

OS Grabeland - work in progress since 2008