alana aamodtInformation











 Index

fishfrastructure






A oxygenating wheel attached to a fish ladder attached to a dam attached to a river.

year

2024



role

designer, fabricator


materials
steel, wood, found biycyle wheel, aluminum cans from the river









The Woonasquatucket River in Rhode Island is 16 miles long and has 18 dams crossing it. The first five dams have fish ladders added to them, so fish can navigate up and around the dam. This fish ladder, the Manton Pond fishway, leads fish from a gurgling creek to a glassy pond, where the stillness can make fish vulnerable and the water lack oxygen.





In the spirit of American engineering and progress ever forward, I solved this by adding an oxygenating wheel that directly extends from the fishway. 







“Infrastructure is built on an installed base. Infrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base. Optical fibers run along old railroad lines, new systems are designed for backward compatibility…”

-Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure
 
alternative oxygentating ideas


 Aluminum cans fished from the river bubble as the fill with water and then, at the top, pour the water back into the river, disturbing the water surface and oxygentating the water for fish.









more is more is more is more!




Installation:


Installed






Sketch of wedge mechanism that inserts into the fish ladder, acting as a lever to keep the water wheel upright 

The entire installation was cantilevered using a wooden wedge in the cement structure of the fish ladder.
Wooden wedge in action




If you walk along the Woonasquatocket river down from here, it will wind its way towards downtown Providence, under the highway and straight through the mall, where the salt cove used to be before being filled in for the train station.

Highways, malls, trains, and dams embody and reflect what American society 20th century valued when built: individualism, consumption, speed, and power. They build on each other-- more exciting to build a new bridge than to repair one; easier to build a fish ladder than to remove a dam.




‘fishfrastructure’ plays with this idea of adding on, but takes cues from the fishladder, placing the fish rather than humans.