Stephen Pevnick, Ph.D., is an artist, and water is his medium. He creates graphic waterfalls where falling drops of water are timed precisely to create images as they fall. “It’s like an enormous inkjet printer that uses water instead of ink,” Pevnick said.
The waterfalls are constructed of four-foot sections. Pumps draw water from tanks at the base of the structure up to the top. Each section has its own computer and 576 nozzles with one-eighth-inch orifices that release water drops back into the tanks.
“All of the computers talk to each other,” said Lee Schneider, hardware and systems design engineer at Pevnick Design. The network ensures that drops from each section “are released at exactly the right time and at the right pressure.”
The result is graphical images made of falling water. The images can be abstract (dancing lines, twirling ribbons, patterns in motion), and they can be pictorial (logos, words, objects).
The addition of lighting “makes the drops look like falling diamonds,” Pevnick said. Some waterfalls have multiple layers, creating a greater sense of depth and dimension. The minimum height for one of Pevnick’s waterfalls is 12 feet.
Keeping the water clean is critical. “Even small amounts of dirt can clog the nozzles,” Pevnick said. The water is chemically treated with organic, non-toxic peroxide, the same chemical that’s used to clean contact lenses. For long-term installations, the water is also filtered with ultra violet light to keep it clean and free of bacteria.
Many of Pevnick’s waterfalls are used as temporary installations at trade shows for companies like Kohler and Chrysler and at large public events like the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and the NFL Commissioner’s Party for Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa.
He also has designed permanent waterfalls for shopping malls in Athens, Guatemala City and Montreal; the Batavia Downs Racetrack and Casino in Batavia, N.Y.; and for Coca-Cola’s corporate headquarters in Atlanta.
Pevnick has received commissions from multi-national corporations like Samsung, IBM, Anheuser-Busch, Toyota and Nestle, and his waterfalls have appeared in cities around the world including Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, Paris and Mexico City.
In October 2014, Pevnick created a 12-foot-tall waterfall for Ocean Spray. It was displayed at one end of a 60-foot-long cranberry bog that was constructed at Rockefeller Plaza. The waterfall was programmed to create images of the Ocean Spray logo alternating with images of falling cranberries.
Another waterfall appeared at the entrance to an exhibit celebrating the King of Thailand on the 60th anniversary of his ascension to the throne. The waterfall, which was viewed by 4.5 million people, displayed the royal crest. The King plays the saxophone, so Pevnick also programmed the image of a sax into the waterfall graphics.
His waterfalls have appeared at the Jeep exhibit at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit over a period of eight years. A video of the waterfall became the 10th most watched video on YouTube during the week of the show, according to the Journal Sentinel.
During the High Holy Days in the fall of 2013, one of Pevnick’s waterfalls was installed at Ben Gurion Airport. This waterfall could receive text messages – in English and in Hebrew –and display the words as graphics.
The Pevnick Design studio is located in Milwaukee on 27th Street in the former Clybourn Street School building, which dates back to 1878. A large addition to the west side of the building was built in 1948. At one time the space was home to the Pohlman Photographic Studios, which specialized in industrial photography. Pevnick has left two cycloramas in place as a reminder of this former tenant. The cyclorama has curves instead of 90 degree angles where the walls meet the ceiling and the floor. The space is painted gray and “disappears” behind the subject when photos are taken.*
Pevnick’s studio is a warren of separate spaces that are devoted to different aspects of building the waterfalls: a wood and plastic shop, a machine shop, a software lab, an electronics lab, a module assembly space, a blueprint area, a test room and a breakroom with a foosball table. A map of the world with dozens of pins hangs from a wall in the studio. Each pin represents an installation, and they are scattered everywhere.
Pevnick made his serendipitous discovery that water could create graphics when he was teaching at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The music department had a hard-to-find programmable data processor (PDPII), an early mini-computer with a paper tape operating system that predated the floppy disc.
The head of the department would only allow the computer to be used for music-related research. Pevnick made up a project: exploring the percussive sounds of water drops. He hypothesized that the pitter patter of water drops could create the illusion of movement. “Your eyes will follow the sounds of the water drops,” Pevnick said. “It redefines your perception of space.”
He explored his hypothesis with the assistance of another researcher who held a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics. Together they created a structure with a row of eight nozzles. They used music composition software to create a program that would release successive individual drops of water. But Pevnick made an error; his algorithm was off by one decimal point. The drops fell faster than they should have – so rapidly that they created an image of a moving diagonal line.
Pevnick called this a metamorphosis. “Once I found out about the graphics, I forgot about the sound.” He then moved on to build a four-foot by four-foot structure with 64 nozzles and used the computer to program the water to create images as they fell.
Pevnick grew up in the University City section of St. Louis, Mo. with his parents and two sisters and a large extended family. He still has 23 first cousins who live there. He said that, as a child, he “liked to build stuff.” He spent many hours building electro-mechanically-controlled cranes, and he had to create all of the controls and components himself.
Pevnick’s father sold clothing and furniture in central St. Louis, occasionally frequenting a rough neighborhood just east of the town of Ferguson, the site of recent riots related to a police shooting. In a robbery, his father was shot three times by a heroin addict. He survived and, after several months of convalescence, went back to his business.
Pevnick was encouraged to join his father’s business, but he found the prospect “depressing. The people were so poor, so fearful. Even when it was 90 degrees out, they lived in closed up houses to make themselves safer,” he said. Fortunately Pevnick’s father also gave him the option of attending college.
Pevnick earned his BA degree in design from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1968 and his MFA degree in multimedia from Washington University in St. Louis in 1972. He taught sculpture at the University of South Florida in Tampa before he moved to Milwaukee where he is currently a professor at the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He looks the part: salt and pepper curls, gold-rimmed glasses, a green V-neck sweater, a blue striped button down shirt and a red polka-dotted bow tie.
Pevnick has received many grants to support his work including a large one from the Kohler Company and several others from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1983 he was recognized with an award from the Industrial Designer’s Society of America for excellence in design.
Early in his career Pevnick worked in the office of R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller in Carbondale, Ill. and at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, Mo.
He lives with his wife, Laurie, and their son, Gershie, in Glendale, Wis.
Loading ...