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This text is an excerpt from
the essay Imagine No Horizons, by
Alistair Rider.
The full text is included in HICA's Exhibitions 2010 publication.
IV2 6UA: I
type the postcode into Google Maps, and the window of my browser fills
instantly with swaths of green. And there in the middle of the screen is
my destination, marked with a red tear-shape, labelled 'A'.
'A' is The
Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, where Thomson & Craighead were
showing their latest work, and I was checking the web before driving over.
As for the trip itself, I can report that I located the gallery with
little difficulty, the weather was fair, and the opening well-attended.
Overall, I can say now that I have a considerably more tangible sense of
this corner of the Highlands. So much so that I am tempted to consider my
attempts to gain some initial bearings by scrolling around on Google Maps
as being as insignificant to me now as I feel about my dreams from last
night.
At least
that would be true, were it not for Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead. This
is because the mainstay of their art is involved in making viewers
register the reality of networks in new, concrete ways. We might say that
often their aim is to materialize the internet in the space of the
gallery. And because of this, when I think back on my visit I can't quite
separate that strange, disembodied aerial image of HICA's surrounding
terrain from my other memories of this place.
Thanks to
the ubiquity of Google Maps and Google Earth anyone with access to
broadband can plug in the name of a location and see what it looks like
from above.
It seems
to me that the theorist Timothy Morton offers a new angle on this
particular matter. He pointed out recently that when we use satellite
technologies to look at the earth from outer space we are no longer
perceiving the world from within a horizon.
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Such
facilities give a disturbing sense of connectedness. And once we grasp how
those other places are contiguous with our own, then maybe that often
powerful impression of feeling rooted in a spot, or a particular
landscape, starts to feel just that little less important. Perhaps all
along it was dependent on us not seeing (or refusing to see) the 'extra
dimension' that satellite technology and a globalized perspective
provides. 'A place bound by a horizon now seems like a mere patch', Morton
affirms.i
In its
initial version, Horizon was a gallery installation for 'Timecode', a
group show at Dundee Contemporary Arts that took place in 2009.ii There
the work consisted of a bank of monitors, with each row displaying the
view from various pre-existing webcams, chosen from every time zone around
the world. An array of different buildings and landscapes are visible in
the foregrounds: a mosque, an airport runway, and so on. But each day, as
the earth revolves, the cameras register the light levels at that part of
the globe, resulting in waves of daylight and darkness being relayed
across the screens. Here, however, the sun's progress is recorded at all
points around the world, so that every hour of the day is seen in relation
to all the other views that are being observed across the planet. In this
charting of temporality, no one location is singled out. From a viewer's
perspective, there are no peripheries and no centre, no seasons, no day,
nor night. Instead, there is a disorienting, dislocated array of centres,
horizons, daytimes and nighttimes.
You might
well be asking why dislocation is more interesting than merely delighting
in a sense of being located and fixed in a particular place, or why
feeling unanchored in time is any more commendable than affirming the
sensations and delights of this very instant. But Morton would argue that
this loss of traditional reference-points is not something that should be
mourned, because it allows us to embrace a radical openness, in which
everything becomes stranger than we ever imagined. He names this 'the
ecological thought': it involves an acceptance that there are always more
points of view than just ours. Indeed, in some of their most provocative
works, perhaps Thomson & Craighead help promote that outlook as well.
v Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought,
p. 56.
vi 'Timecode' ran at Dundee Contemporary
Arts from 17 January to 8 March 2009. |
