Into the horizonoftheinfinite.Net, 2018
"Into the horizonoftheinfinite.NET" is a digital installation that displays an ever-changing, but never-ending, image of sunset and sunrise. Each image is broadcast live from a web camera that is linked to at the actual time of sunset and sunrise in the host country.
The inspiration for the work was to explore the feeling that it is the earth’s rotation that defines time; that time as we know it is catalogued by the movement of the earth, on its axis and also in orbit around the sun, and as such it’s an arbitrary period of duration that dictates so much about how we live, how we understand who we are. In the introduction to Henri Bergson’s book, Duration and Simultaneity, Leon Jacobson describes this phenomenon with the following sentence, “For us, it is the earth's rotation that is the model motion tracing the path of time. Time then seems to us "like the unwinding of a thread, like the journey of the mobile [the earth] entrusted with measuring it.”
With this digital installation there is an attempt to freeze time, to halt the turning rotation of the earth.
Discovering that the earth is moving away from the sun fractionally every year heightens the feeling of a fear of the void. This fear of the void is what led to the appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing titled “In the horizon of the infinite” from The Gay Science for the title. The website almost becomes a doomsday clock as, with each year passing, the image of sun becomes smaller and smaller.
Links:
Into the horizonoftheinfinite.Net (diptych)Into the horizonoftheinfinite.Net (sunset)
Into the horizonoftheinfinite.Net (sunrise)