In 2010, two years before the official Canal Convergence, Fausto Fernandez created Flowing Overlapping Gesture, a site-specific floating installation over the canal commissioned by Scottsdale Public Art and managed by Margaret Bruning, former director of civic art for Los Angeles County and former associate director for Scottsdale Public Art in Arizona. The artwork installation logistics was complex; a group of people assembled, painted, and installed in the dry canal for a period of two weeks. The artwork rose to the surface by floating when the water returned. It was originally made of foam—an insulator used in new home construction, and, like the canal system, it helps make life in the desert possible for the modern dweller. Unfortunately, after the work was completed, half of the project had to be dismantled due to an approaching storm, which destroyed part of the project, making it impossible to reassemble with water back in the canal. The project never had an official opening and was never presented entirely to the public. This project is now presented in augemented reality—12 years later—as Flowing Overlapping Gesture 2.0, with the assistance of Hoverlay, an augmented reality platform, and animations by Nicholas Townsend. 

Fernandez incorporates machines and stylized motifs of common tools such as pliers and gears in his paintings as objects that require human force to work by helping us carry out particular functions. The tools and machines serve as metaphors for how, when we are in love, we lose sight of reality and our true nature, making our behavior mechanical and autonomous.   

More about the artist: https://canalconvergence.com/work/flowing-overlapping-gesture-2-0/