Exhibition: Imminent Domain - Designing for the Life of Tomorrow (Group Show)
Curator: Fumio Nanjo (Mori Art Museum - Tokyo, Japan)
Title: Pattern Recognition
Role: Concept, Research, Design, Production
Venue: Hong Kong Asia Society
Date: 2013, January 31st to March 31st
Description: The work features: a moving galaxy projection of stars on an atomic/cellular canopy that can be observed from laying on reflective pods below; three long and narrow light boxes - two containing 7 vials each of my DNA, engraved with the name of characters or plants from science-fiction stories, and the third displays a negative film strip of 36 images. A partial list of names and images appears below.
Artist Statement: The Universe is so vast, that the star from which the starlight originated may no longer exist… This is because light travels at a finite speed of 300,000 kilometers or 186,282 miles per second. It takes light years (1 light year = 5.8 trillion miles) for starlight to reach Earth, 8.3 seconds for sunlight to reach Earth, and light can circle around the Earth 7.4 times in 1 second.
So, in the time that it takes starlight to reach us, something might have happened to the star. This is what is meant by the saying that looking at stars is like looking back in time.
We are here today through the scientific and imaginary tales of the becoming of our nearest star, the Sun. We have bent, dissected, reflected, focused, captured and played with waves of light through all kinds of lenses, filters, barrels, circuits and cables at different time intervals to see the beauty of supernovae in the nucleus of our cells.
We are spun from the stuff of stars – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen … coiled tightly within the history of life, coded in our DNA. We look within and beyond – at the past.
Images - engraved names (selections): TRUFFULA TREE The Lorax, Dr. Seuss / FAUST Der Tragödie erster Teil (German) - Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe / ENSAIO SOBRE A CEGUEIRA (Portuguese) Essay on Blindness, José Saramago / ICARUS (Greek Mythology) Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth / MOLY Odyssey, Homer / LOTUS TREE Odyssey, Homer / PROMETHEUS (Greek Mythology) Deity known as the creator of mankind / MORS ONTOLOGICA a flower from A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick.
Images - negative film strip (selections): photo by Lennart Nilsson of the face of a five week old embryo which is approximately 9mm long and in the process of developing openings for the mouth, the nostrils and eyes; below this main image are a few of the others from the film strip: a bomb testing audience - Operation Greenhouse, Enewetak Atoll, 1951; Photo 51, Rosalind Franklin, 1952; I think - Darwin’s first evolutionary tree - Charles Darwin; and an MRI of a baby at the moment of birth.