WISHING WELL

Make waves together.

Wishing Well is an art installation about connection: a single body of water, shared by everyone who gathers around it.

An array of laser beams is projected up through a glass-bottomed pool. Still water lets the beams pass clean and straight. The moment someone touches the surface, the ripples bend the light, and the beams begin to sway and dance with the disturbed water.

By it’s nature it is a multi-participant experience. There is no single point of interaction and no one person in control. A fingertip dipped at one edge sends ripples across the whole pool, reshaping the light in front of a stranger on the other side. Every gesture is felt by everyone else, inviting people to notice each other’s waves and play together, meeting ripple with ripple.

The water carries a trace of every visitor. Through fundamental physics the installation can never return to its original state: even when the surface falls calm again, some of the water will have been carried away on the hands of those who touched it. Each participant leaves the well a little changed, and takes a little of it with them.