Beneath the blue vaults of the market, we prefer to seek out little remarked aquatic manifestations in order to notice the emblematic potentials of moving liquid and light. Most citizens wash cups. Psychology pours from our objects. Thus, when we are strolling, we wish to abandon salubrious habit to better welcome spontaneous transitions to collective states. For a while at least, we shrug off the theology of extravagance.
Small causes can form large results.
But for us, rising jets, downward falls, combinations, or an oddly issuing spray happily divert us from the great constant impersonal desires so that we may notice and enjoy the supple nap and receptivity of human thought. Light and gaiety and movement stimulate our civic thirsts. Downtown in the economic district each fountain's site is scooped from the monetary grid, hidden among corporations, rather than symbolically radiating a public logic of civic identity and access. Here the water features seem gently irrelevant, or relevant only as cheerful prosthetics to the atmosphere of the logo. At the sparkling edges of pedestrian consciousness they dribble and froth.