An indoor drip system, so that a green interior could take care of itself.
While doing landscaping work in the desert of New Mexico I learned how to install outdoor drip irrigation. Working with those water-conserving systems made me wonder whether there was a way to produce a similar system indoors — the sheet works out a valve and a timer, a source that is either municipal or rain, and tubing that could be exposed or hidden.
The note in the corner reads plants absorb pollutants and improve indoor air quality. That was the argument: not decoration, infrastructure.
Twenty-one years later I built it. The Smart Tillandsia Care vase is this drawing with sensors in it — the same enclosed green interior watering itself on a schedule instead of on my memory. The valve and timer sketched here became a piezo atomizer and a microcontroller.
Watercolours, ink and pencil · independent project · 2005