Now, in review, the two videos are plays on thoughts of “relativity” and a confusion of scales. At the time, I was annoyed by the ever present “working with space”, since everything – including art – always indirectly has to do with some kind of space. The phenomenological abbreviation of space as a place of experiences that transforms itself through design sounds to me like a nice paraphrase of invasive control that determines place and experiences. And yet this nitpicking, trying to find ever new instances to illustrate this, is basically a game of shells:
In the space of the exhibition, a second space has to be drawn upon, so that the exhibition consists of the interaction of both spaces, so to speak, and the exhibition of the videos thus also reflects their being embedded in another – larger – space. Because originally both videos were part of another – larger – work entitled An Archaeology of the Coming, and so in this relation – due to the fact that I only wrote the script and researched images for these videos, but the creation and animation was fortunately taken over by Florentine Bofinger – there is yet another connection.
By placing things of completely different scales in the same, so to speak “virtual” space in the videos – the Pillars of Creation & the Earth or the primordial turtle fossil of “Pappochelys rosinae” & the supernova “SN2006gy” – they imitate the shell game.
A pleasure that also ChatGPT understands:
User: Write 2 or 3 sentences about the similarities of the fossile Pappochelys Rosinae and the supernova SN2006gy.
AI: The intriguing similarity between these seemingly unrelated entities lies in their chronological proximity. Both Pappochelys Rosinae and the supernova SN2006gy share a time separation of 240 million years. Despite existing in vastly different realms, this shared temporal bond draws attention to the interconnectedness of cosmic events across immense time scales.
Alexander Sowa
