Dutch artist Helmut Smits created a machine that can convert a bottle of Coca-Cola into a glass of clean drinking water in one day. Ronald Smits
Dutch artist Helmut Smits created a machine that can convert a bottle of Coca-Cola into a glass of clean drinking water in one day.
The Real Thing is meant as a commentary on the fact that Coke is more readily available than clean drinking water in some parts of Africa and Asia. Ronald Smits
The Real Thing is meant as a commentary on the fact that Coke is more readily available than clean drinking water in some parts of Africa and Asia.
Smits got the idea when he looked at Coca-Cola "as if he were an alien," and realized it looks like dirty brown water. Ronald Smits
Smits got the idea when he looked at Coca-Cola "as if he were an alien," and realized it looks like dirty brown water.
Scientists at Synthetic Organic Chemistry Group at the University of Amsterdam helped him create a machine that boils Coka and then collects the water vapor. Ronald Smits
Scientists at Synthetic Organic Chemistry Group at the University of Amsterdam helped him create a machine that boils Coka and then collects the water vapor.
Helmut Smits’s installation piece is titled The Real Thing. It’s a nod to the long running Coca-Cola campaign that kicked off in 1969, and it’s also sarcastic. As Smits says, “of course water is the real thing.”
Smits’s version of The Real Thing looks like an array of lab equipment from a high school chemistry class. There’s a glass bottle of Coca-Cola boiling in a beaker of oil. As the sugary drink boils, it slowly yields water vapor that’s then caught in glass piping and transferred into another beaker. In just one day, the machine can convert a bottle of Coke into a glass of clean drinking water. If you’ve ever seen Waterworld, this will surely sound a little familiar.
Ronald Smits
Smits is an artist, not a designer, and came up with the idea back in 2006. “I’m quite critical towards big companies, so of course Coca-Cola, they’re like the biggest company, and they are inspiring in that way,” he says. Smits has a particular methodology for starting his art projects: He picks a subject, then tries to observe it like an alien, seeing it for the first time. “So I looked at Coca-Cola not as Coca-Cola, but as I’ve never seen it before. And then I saw dirty brown water,” he says. “It was logical to filter it to clean drinking water.” Smits doesn’t have a chemistry background, so he worked with scientists at the Synthetic Organic Chemistry Group at the University of Amsterdam to create the working installation. It’s currently on display at the Sense Nonsense exhibit at Dutch Design Week.
One of the oddities of Coca-Cola is that it’s a synthetic consumer good, but it’s still more readily available than clean drinking water in some parts of Africa and Asia. That’s why in recent years Coca-Cola has launched new programs like Water and Development Alliance (WADA) to bring drinking water and sanitation services to estimated tens of millions in those continents, and backed experiments like AidPod, in which packets of anti-diarrheal medicine get shipped around the world by piggybacking in crates of the soft drinks.
Smits isn’t pretending that The Real Thing will improve access to clean water, but he says it’s part of the project to make that issue top of mind for anyone who sees it. “I don’t want to turn all the Coca-Cola in the world into water, or sell systems where people can turn Coke into water,” Smits says. Instead, The Real Thing is designed to inspire a mental exercise: “I want them to think about how there are places in the world where people don’t have access to drinking water, but they have access to Coca-Cola.”
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