TELEMATIC, ROMANCE, AND THE POETICS OF TIME AND PLACE
While in San Jose for ISEA 2006 I got to check out the Edge Conditions exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. One of the projects, Light From Tomorrow by Thomson & Craighead stirred some interesting thoughts.
The project is comprised of a lightbox in a gallery (or in this case museum) space which is connected to a light sensor located in the Kingdom of Tonga, which lies at the edge of the International Date Line. The light readings from Tonga are sent over the internet to the lightbox, which reproduce the light levels. Two seperate clocks display the local time of the installation and the local time in Tonga. The piece is intended as a poetic reflection on distance, time, and global communications. (In the gallery, the light from “tomorrow” can be seen “today.”) We’re meant to perhaps feel a sense of interconnectedness, wonder, and perhaps optimism. But for me the project causes me to think of the problematic questions which only recieve oblique treatment in the piece.
Light From Tomorrow transmits light values from the “future” or “tomorrow” which is defined as such by the International Date Line. Seems relatively straightforward, but given the murky way in which the Date Line has shifted due to national interest, and its Eurocentric origins I can’t help but feel that the piece inadvertently continues to look at our global society from a colonizing lens.
As anyone may find by googleing the subject the International Date Line is described as an “imaginary” line, whose placement is “arbitrary” (or more oftenly used) “convenient.” It is a line which is “roughly” placed at 180° degrees longitude but in reality zigzags through the pacific, cutting around nations and land formations to suit governmental needs. Discovered as a result of European expansion motivated by colonizing expeditions, the International Date Line contains within its history a fascinating statement as to how our very understanding of time and distance are based upon particular conventions and how delicate our awareness of this is.
Light From Tomorrow spends very little time attempting to draw us into this paradox. Instead the familiar trope of poetic distance and an exotic uknown are put to the forefront. Even the term “expedition” to describe travel to the Kingdom of Tonga harkens back to Colonial days of travel and conquest. We are told that we will see the light from “tomorrow” today, as if our grasp out to the future were not embedded within the construct of “arbitrary”, “convenient”, and “imaginary” lines drawn on the globe. This irony is made ever more apparent when viewing this diagram which shows the relative near physical proximity, yet extreme temporal dissonance of the two installation sites. If not for convention’s sake, Tonga and California could both be “today,” they share more in common geographically, but this is not something that the artists draw attention to. Which, within the context of the Pacific Rim theme of ISEA 2006, strikes as me somewhat odd. Instead “otherness” is played up:
We think of the gallery component of this artwork as a romantic landscape, which is both minimal and monumental; a space for contemplation, a poetic void and an experiment in time travel.
Is this voyeuristic frontiergazing? Has the population and country of Tonga been rendered anonymous and voiceless by being represented in the abstract, as a poetic void? To suggest that would be simplistic, but the project does bring to mind another telematic work which contrasts heavily to the approach Light From Tomorrow has taken.
Hole in the Earth by Maki Ueda is a public space installation in which audience/participants from two different cities can see and hear each other through an internet-connected audio and video feed. The streamed footage is embeded into an outdoor installation which resembles a ‘hole’ in the earth, so that the audience feels as if they are literally looking through to the other side of the world. Initially the project connected the two cities of Rotterdam (Netherlands) and Bandung (Indonesia.) In the artist’s words Hole in the Earth:
is about the fascination for how the other side of the earth would be, and is about connecting two totally different cultures on the earth.
Both Light From Tomorrow and Hole in the Earth connect two places across time and space, but with Ueda’s work we get a more balanced power differential between the parties involved. Granted both projects have different points they want to make about this increasingly connected world we live in, but within those points there is still the issue of what power relations and historical connections are foregrounded. Hole in the Earth plays with the unknown on the “other” side of the earth, but playfully toys not only with what we would “see” if we could do so, but also addresses who might be looking back. In Light From Tomorrow, we do not see anybody in the “future,” only a blank canvas of light for our projection and fantasy. But “tomorrow” is situated in a place. “Tomorrow” does have an identity and a context. To ignore this is disappointing at best, and in today’s political climate, possibly dangerous.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:13 am
Katherine,
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