As A Machine That Would Never Break

Watershed: A River’s Call to Action, is a collaboration with XAP, running throughout May 2025 in St Albans Cathedral. The project is a response to the violation of our UK rivers by neglect and mismanagement, in particular the nearby River Ver – a very special chalk stream – which has has been subjected to sewage dumping, with little respite, over the last year and beyond.

Created for Watershed, As A Machine That Would Never Break is a continuous interactive video installation, which speaks of an abused river pushed to breaking point.  Over 100 pieces of footage of the rivers Ver and Lea, shifting in scale, texture and cadence, play in random layered sequence, creating a never-repeating flow over the month-long installation.  Via an Xbox Kinect, visitors are transported into the artwork itself, immersed in sparkling watercourses, bobbing amongst sewage and everything in between. Text fragments are harvested randomly from online documents: data points of every sewage discharge into the Ver since the project began, water testing data, Thames Water’s Annual Report 2023-4, riverfly counts, road runoff reports and more.

Interactive video installation programmed in C++/openFrameworks on MacOS + Xbox Kinect. Source video captured by Angela Mellen, Liz Sergeant, Joe Mellen, Laura Dekker.