Bruno Latour, Anti-Zoom

The optical devices and unexpected courses of events in Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition disturb our perceptions and force us to address the question of scale in space and time in an entirely new manner.

For in fact neither the schema of space nor that of time appears continuous: levels of reality do not nestle one within the other like Russian dolls. It cannot be said that the small or the short lies within the large or the long, in the sense that the largest or the longest contain them but with just “fewer details.” When one shifts from a map on a scale of 1 cm. to 1 km. to one on 1 cm. to 10 km. the latter does not contain the same information, if less exact, as the former: it contains other information that might (or might not) coincide with what appears in the former.

This metaphor emerges from the optics of photography, from the zoom created by the use of a lens called—it’s obvious why—”telescopic.” In fact, one might almost posit a rule: good artists do not believe in zoom effects.

Bruno Latour, Anti-Zoom, excerpt from Contact catalogue

Caroline A. Jones, Event Horizon

We are convinced that horizons exist, even if we never reach them. Relational and species-specific, horizons take very different forms for the scurrying beetle, the preying hawk, and the navigating shark. The etymology for the word itself is rooted in a “limiting circle,” yet we also learn, in living with it, that the horizon is limitless and untouchable: it’s just over there, where the future promises to reveal itself, and there, where the past recedes– eternally morphing as we approach, eternally disappearing behind us.

Caroline A. Jones, Event Horizon
Excerpt from Contact catalogue

Liminal, Richard Sennett, excerpt from Contact catalogue

Liminal: an arty, abstruse, abused word. Also, a real experience. “Liminal” names that moment when things are on the edge of appearing or disappearing, you aren’t sure which. “Liminal” can name the play of shadows on a wall; uncertainty comes because you don't know whose bodies casts the shadow, or, if the shadow is giant, whether the real body is also giant, or instead, minute -- the shadow, as it were, greater than the self. Again, a liminal experience can be one in which a strong, contained light obscures rather than illuminates the space around it, like the penumbra of strong light and deep dark which occurs as an eclipse of the moon comes and goes; during this transition, you are aware of darkness in a way you normally aren’t.

Richard Sennett, Liminal, excerpt from Contact catalogue

Featured video: rediscovered film material of Vortex for Lofoten, 1999
On view as part of the exhibition opening on Saturday at the Langen Foundation

Excerpt from Jacques Derrida ‘White Mythology’, in Margins of Philosophy

Each time that there is a metaphor, there is doubtless a sun somewhere; but each time there is sun, metaphor has begun. If the sun is metaphorical always, already, it is no longer completely natural. It is always, already, a luster, a chandelier, one might say an artificial construction, if one could still give credence to this signification when nature has disappeared. For if the sun is no longer completely natural, what in nature does remain natural?

Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology’

To track the sun is to track yourself. The sun tracker locates the centre of your orbital ellipse, giving your position right now and rendering visible your path. The reflexive potential lies in understanding that the sun does not rise or set; it is we who are the mirrors, who are circulating, tracking, spinning in our Keplerian ellipses. I want to encourage seeing yourself in a non-egoistic way. You and I are not the centre of the universe, but in fact spinning in altruistic space.

Olafur Eliasson