Thank you for taking the time to consider, ‘Light from Tomorrow’ and for posting your response to our work.

We would like to emphasise that for us, this work _is_ about some of the paradoxes you touch on in your critique and although you suggest we spend very little time attempting to draw viewers into the paradoxical nature of the work’s conceit, we do think we have tried to give some clues, while striving to avoid being didactic or prescriptive, which for us would be a problematic stance to take.

For example, we describe, ‘Light from Tomorrow’ as, ‘an experiment in time travel’, which is literally true if you adhere to the International Dateline from the relative position of the light box in San Jose, but patently untrue in many other ways -not least because the sun sets in the west and rises in the east. We think this is implicit in the work and offers a fundamental paradox/contradiction from which a reading of the work can be made. We do not consider this to be oblique.

We also try and acknowledge historical precedents for establishing Longitude in the first place by (for example) describing our impossible journey as an, ‘expedition.’ An absurd gesture conjuring historical ghosts and one which might make viewers speculate further on the socially and historically constructed nature of global time zones etc. In some senses every time we look at a clock we are engaging with these histories at some level and in some ways, ‘Light from Tomorrow’ reveals this architecture of time and time zones we hope or at least reminds us of them.

By highlighting the temporal distance between two relatively local geographical spots and then exacerbating it in a satirical manner, we wanted to expose the ‘arbitrary’ and ‘imaginary’ nature of the dateline. ‘Hole in the Earth’ looks like a great project and is a communications system. ‘Light from Tomorrow’ is not a communications system.

When referring to a ‘poetic void’, we are referring to the imageless image we have hung in the gallery and not The Kingdom of Tonga or Wellington, New Zealand. One of the reasons we visited Tonga as the artwork’s first location west of the dateline was because it is an independent autochthonous monarchy. For us the image we place in the gallery is a kind of hole (void), and as such we hope the paradox, pathos, poetry and irony of the work’s grand, flawed, literally true and untrue gesture is both belittled and elevated simultaneously.

thanks and best wishes,

Jon & Alison