‘Nereda 2: a Hydromancy’  (short film)
This film was made in response to a residency project, Hydromedia, connecting the arts to water ecologies
Nereda 2: a Hydromancy was made as part of the Hydromedia project: “Hydromedia mobilizes the arts to visualize the Green Deal (area 7) agenda in tangible ways so to promote transnational dissemination and audience engagement.” Hydromancy is a method of divination through water. The divinators are not the authors of the utterings.

The video uses an audio recording of the discharge of one of the bassins (“Nereda 2”) on the terrain of the HDSR waste water treatment plant in Overvecht (NL), which was then digitally distilled to reveal a speech. “Psellus de damonibus sheweth how it is done: that the deuills creepe in the bottome, and send forth a still confused sound, which cannot bee fully vnderstood, that they may be held to say what euer come to passe, and not to lye.”

16th century, Juan Luis Vives as commentary on St. Augustinus “Concerning the Hydromancy Through Which Numa Was Befooled by Certain Images of Demons Seen in the Water.” The Diviners are not the Authors of the Utterings is inspired by the article ‘Why Diviniation? Evolved Psychology and Strategic Interaction in the Production of Truth’ by Pascal Boyer (2020, published in Current Anthropology, volume 61, issue 1)




Bio
Alexandra Crouwers (The Netherlands, 1974) is a visual artist and artistic researcher exploring digital tools as mediators for attempts to establish (extra-anthropocentric) connections across time, space and ecologies. This results in a body of work that centers on immersive video installations using digital animation, but ventures into .gifs, emoji proposals, augmented reality and scanned models, audio, and text.

@alexa_crwrs
https://www.alexandracrouwers.com