FLOW
morning rose (styx) 2025
Kunstmuseum Heidenheim

Based on a smaller earlier iteration, morning rose (styx) was created specifically for the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, where the rooms of the Hermann Voith Galerie extend beneath the city’s former public swimming pool. Within this unusual architectural setting, the installation spreads like an electro-organic network that evokes root systems or subterranean waterways, accompanied by a sound work by Daniel Door that subtly anchors the atmosphere of the space. The subtitle styx deepens these associations by referencing the mythological boundary river separating different realms.

At the center of the former swimming hall, a large water basin anchors the system. From there, water travels through tubes into adjoining rooms and eventually into a computer integrated into an additional circuit of aquatic plants. Running continuously during the museum’s opening hours, the computer acts as a central node: the water cools its active processor while the device contributes computational power to the “CERN at home” program, extending the distributed network of CERN into the museum’s interior. Human presence enters this ecosystem just as naturally. Visitors may add water or saliva to the basin, allowing traces of their own biology to join the circulating current. Motion-sensitive light sculptures respond to movement, illuminating the plants and triggering photosynthesis, and even the act of leaving a drink outside the exhibition space subtly mirrors the dependence on water shared by bodies, machines, and organisms.

After leaving the computer, the warmed water continues through the remaining rooms, gradually cooling before returning to the central basin. Through this continuous cycle, the installation weaves human action, biological processes, technological systems, and global data infrastructures into a single circulating organism, revealing how closely each component relies on the others to sustain the flow that keeps the work alive.