Water Waves - Time Horizon
1993 27 min loop sound BetaSP/Laserdisc 8-channel/10-screen

I have always been fascinated by, and challenged to project in my films, the therapeutic energy of movement in nature that contains fundamental principles and a great narrative potential. Water Waves - the Time Horizon concept - heralds a whole new realm of expressiveness in this domain.

I developed the installation at the San Francisco Exploratorium where I was artist-in-residence. A prototype version was first displayed during the ‘Tracing Time’ exhibition (May 1992). The final 8-channel/10-screen version premièred as part of the ‘Environmental Art’ show (May 1993), then was permanently exhibited at the Exploratorium until ~ 2003. 

In 2013, the Exploratorium commissioned me to restore the Water Waves - Time Horizon for the museum's new location on Pier 15 in San Francisco.  

The waves were filmed on the northern shores of Oahu and Kauai, Hawaii.
AZ

“Andrej Zdravič's video installation, Water Waves, is a captivating work and a superb example of rich artistic vision. Its ten high resolution monitors arranged horizontally in a shallow arc against a black backdrop in dim lighting mark a horizon that suggests a limit to the march of modernism.
Clearly resonant with Muybridge and Marey, this installation is a Baconian examination of all varieties of water waves and simultaneously a Taoist or Zen meditation on wave motion. Zdravič is able to transform the video installation into a complete filmic experience, enlarging, rather than reducing, our experience of the phenomena he so obsessively articulates. The monitors are not large, but when multiplied by ten, in a darkened setting, separated by short increments of void and spanning a range beyond the sixty-degree cone of vision, they become immense, full-scale cinema screens in miniature. This paradoxical scale shift is reinforced by enlarging and rigorous cropping of phenomenal events outside our usual perceptual frame of reference. As the waves appear to flow serially through the screens, the power of the wave movement actively engages us in both an emotional and analytic response. The effect is that the setting erases the technology. And what comes forward are the phenomena in all their sensuality and symbolic power."
Mark Bartlett, writer, teacher and artist - a review of the Water Waves prototype, for Artweek, San Francsico, 1992