Case study · Interactive sculpture · City of Hamilton
Navitas
Two thousand LEDs, one lake, and the work it takes to bring water home.
Navitas — Latin for energy — is an interactive pop-up sculpture that moves participants through the physical process of delivering drinking water to homes across the City of Hamilton. Themes of clean, safe, and healthy drinking water production and consumption are explored visually: treatment, testing, and distribution within an urban environment.
The sculpture is constructed primarily from reclaimed and repurposed materials — aluminum, copper, and wood — and lit by 2,000 LEDs, one for each kilometre of the city’s pressurized water system. It takes real, cooperative work to operate: a teeter-totter hand pump that needs two people, and a hand-cranked generator that keeps the power — and the water — flowing. The infrastructure we never see becomes something a community operates together.
How it works
Pump together
A teeter-totter hand pump needs two people working cooperatively to draw "water" from Lake Ontario through the treatment plant.
Keep the power on
No hydro, no water — a hand-cranked 400-watt generator keeps the whole system flowing.
Watch it travel
2,000 blue LEDs — one for every kilometre of pressurized water main — carry the water out to homes across the city.
Credits
- Partner — City of Hamilton — Hamilton Water
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