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Plenum: Traveling, 1998, 2001

 

 

Plenum: Traveling, 1998/2001, is an installation comprised of small scale digital prints spinning on their vertical axis by means of dc motors. The individual elements are scattered according to the location of the largest stars and constellations in the midnight sky behind the installation during the duration of the exhibition. The images spin at varying rates, sometimes slowly enough that the image is clear and sometimes so quickly that you can barely distinguish the image, invoking our brain’s interpolation software, the persistence of vision.

 


Plenum: Traveling juxtaposes images from various forms of representational tourism, in which photographers seek to know and chart the unknown, from the smallest scale of manipulatable matter to the farthest object ever imaged in the universe. Somewhere in between are images from nineteenth century photographers’ documentation of the settling of the American West via the transcontinental railroad and government geographical surveys and our twenty-first century equivalent, satellite images of tourist destinations, and webcam images of popular vacation spots.

listen
to the sound piece created for a recent installation of Plenum: Traveling at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY, in 2001 (sound by Jane D. Marsching, Victor McSurely, Jamie Edwards, Sue Schardt)--its a big mp3 file, but should play fine on DSL/cable modem or better)

 



 Our travels across the world as vacationers, into the body and out to the galaxies as scientists and explorers, and across history and into the future as philosophers are marked by representational souvenirs, tokens of our journeys and proof of our possession of those places. Scientists have identified the farthest object ever imaged, a quasar; the light is a bit less than a billion years old. At IBM Labs in Zurich, scientists manipulate molecules the size of a few large atoms to make a nanoscale Fender Stratocaster style guitar--a pop culture icon travelling 250 quadrillion times into the Lilliputian sphere. The images remaining from these voyages that we cannot all go on, like the postcards of the Taj Mahal or astronomical photographs of Neptune, are souvenirs of experiences that exist only through the invention of narrative.
 

Also: Plenum I, 1998