niform: interactive installation by Samuel Bianchini, 2007
(via shinyslingback)
‘Misunderstanding Focus’ by Nerhol
“Unless you’ve mastered some mystical Oriental technique of definitive immobility, you’ve most probably noticed your blood flow is impossible to control and even when you’re doing your best not to move a muscle, your blood continues to circulate causing the slightest wavering in your centre of balance. Fascinated by the impossibility of immobility, the Nerhol collective asked 27 subjects to pose for a nearly imperceptible 3-minute time lapse then stacking all the photographs together in a beautifully distorted pile. The resulting portrait series is a tribute to mortality rather than vanity - a gentle reminder that our bodies keep changing every second of every day!”
(via desmesne)
to understand
but time apparently
expands with its
diminishing.”
Japanese artist Mika Aoki uses the ethereal quality of glass to get us to look differently at subjects like viruses, reproduction and the origins of life.
The pillars have been astronomical icons since Hubble imaged them in 1995. They are part of a larger star-forming region called the Eagle Nebula, which lies 7000 light years away. That means we are seeing the pillars as they were 7000 years ago, when the light first left them.
Now, an infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a previously unseen supernova blast wave that was advancing towards the pillars at that time, threatening to ultimately sweep them away.
Based on the cloud’s position, the blast wave looked set to hit the pillars in 1000 years. Taking into account the 7000-year time lag for their light to reach the Earth, that means the pillars were actually destroyed 6000 years ago, Flagey says.
We will not see their obliteration from Earth for another 1000 years, however.
”
Untitled (Perfect Lovers)- Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991.
Conceptual Sculpture - Clocks & paint on wall, 35.6 x 71.2 x 7 cm.
These two identical, adjacent, battery-operated clocks were initially set to the same time, but, with time, they will inevitably fall out of sync. Gonzalez-Torres created this work shortly after his partner, Ross Laycock, was diagnosed with AIDS. By assigning these redundant objects the title”Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), the artist transformed these public, neutral devices used for the measurement of time into personal and poetic meditations on human relationships, mortality, and time’s inevitable flow. Of the light-blue background, Gonzalez-Torres said, “For me if a beautiful memory could have a color that color would be light blue.”
Permanent Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
(via adrowningwoman)
In this project, Time, John Clang photographs pedestrian traffic along the city streets of New York at various times. He then tears multiple photographs into strips, akin to the pieces of a broken mirror, and then puts them together into a single frame. By combining split seconds into one moment he confronts issues of intimacy among crowds of strangers.
(via jettgoesvroom)
Period from the sentence “I’m feeling much better.”
Debbie Grossman, Postmark
When my mother died, I was struck by the idea that all the marks she had ever made would be all the marks she’d ever make. The few letters I had from her, banal as they were, suddenly took on a precious significance. In Postmark, I used my mother’s handwriting as the material with which to create new objects and impossible documents.
of knowledgeable shadows (quick to seize
each nothing which all soulless wraiths proclaim
substance; all heartless spectres, happiness)
lovers alone wear sunlight. The whole truth
not hid by matter; not by mind revealed
(more than all dying life, all living death)
and never which has been or will be told
sings only – and all lovers are the song.
Here (only here) is freedom: always here
no then of winter equals now of spring;
but april’s day transcends november’s year
(eternity being so sans until
twice I have lived forever in a smile)”
Transplant - Uninvited Collaborations with Nature, Nina Katchadourian
Cibachrome, 8 x 10 inches, 1998In my father’s study in our summer cottage in the Finnish archipelago a certain kind of insect called a Jewelwing always dies in droves over the winter. I find many of their delicate green corpses on the windowsill at the start of each summer. Several of these wings were used to repair a plant whose leaves were the same shape as the insect wings.
…the 365 Knitting Clock which can measure time in a three dimensional way. Yes, indeed, this exquisite clock is stitching the time as it goes by. Knitting 365 days, 24 hours a day this clock is translating time through the growth of knitted material. Time is manifested in a 3D way as this clock by the end of the year produces a two meters long scarf making in such a way time tangible.
There is no doubt that time is a measuring system, which enables us to calculate and organize our lives. It’s an inseparable part of our existence and it’s incorporated in our everyday routine in every single possible way. There is none who haven’t taken time into to account.
(via eternalandsilent)
Walter De Maria – Lightning Field, 1971
The Lightning Field, situated in the high desert of New Mexico, is comprised of 400 steel poles that double as lightning rods, embedded in the earth at different levels but all achieving a uniform 20.7 feet in height, and spaced 220 feet apart in rows of 16 by 25. The poles run a mile East-West and a kilometer North-South through a plateau that De Maria chose for its frequent lightning storms, which occur roughly 60 times per year, and for the surrounding area completely absent of any visible development.
-
The piece doesn’t provoke introspection but rather external reflection. With the brutally affecting conditions of altitude, temperature, and sun combined with the sleeplessness of excitement and an intention to stay awake for sunrise, sunset, and as many hours of the night as possible, one is not in the frame of mind to have a distanced critical rumination about interpreting or deconstructing the artwork. On my first walk out, I counted the first seven rows of rods I passed, and then the project seemed irrelevant and I just started to wander. Sometime later in the afternoon, I realized the loudest sound I could hear was that of my blood pumping in my ears. It was as though the static of my customary day-to-day had completely disintegrated. You are deeply inside of it, and subject to it. You become intimate with the space.
