You know how you can have a whole lot of really important things to do, but you end up doing something random and weird and you just can’t stop yourself? That’s what happened to me this week when I made this:
When the Home Depot near my house had their moving sale, I found myself with some cheap Lexan sheets, angle aluminum, and several tubes of silicon adhesive (helpfully packaged as "aquarium sealant"). So I made a tiny little aquarium tank with the materials, with the idea at the back of my head that I would make it into a replica of an Austin creek habitat.
I like to think of this as the continuation of my response to Takashi Amano’s natural aquaria philosophy. Here is a natural habitat that is riddled top to bottom with the artificial. It’s an illustration of some ideas I’ve been talking about. It’s a policy of obfuscating the difference between an urban environment and the natural environment. There is no natural/unnatural dichotomy, there is only the natural, with a tiny subset which is human-centric.
The tank contains a large limestone centerpiece, a partially corroded plastic water bottle, a number of broken pieces of glass, and several rusty bits of metal with no clear purpose. Everything in the tank was scavenged from a creek.
The fish themselves were caught in a creek that was literally in the shadow of a 40-story condo high-rise. I’m thinking that the fish I caught are Guadalupe roundnose minnows.
The rest of the aquaria materials were scavenged. I’m using the same water pump I use for the Cryobev3000, and a lot of leftover tubing parts, for the filtration system. I decided to go with a sand filtration filter, because I could steal sand for free, I already had a bucket, and I’ve always wanted to use PVC piping (it’s like cheap, load-bearing, pressure-rated tinker toys!).
The water overflows from the tank and then filters up through the sand through the holes at the bottom of the PVC pipe.
I also made an indoor fountain to top it all off. Here’s the ornamental limestone with some anchor holes drilled in it. The masonry bit went through the limestone like it was a cheap block of pine. I had no idea, I’ll have to think of more things to do with that drillbit.
And this is the fountain itself, hovering eerily over a tank filled with terrified minnows.
