This is a photograph of the sun at solar noon on June 27, 2012 in Brooklyn, NY:*
Solar noon is moment when the sun is the highest above the horizon on a given day. Before time standardization, all locations had their own local time, and noon was always at solar noon. In a sense, every place had its own noon. After time standardization, when large areas adopted the same time (time zones), this sense of local time disappeared. Time began to be dictated by a clock, not by the location of the sun in the sky. A relationship with the sun began to disappear. For one of my pieces in Lumi Tan’s Matter Out of Place at the Kitchen, I will walk through the city of New York starting at exactly solar noon on a given day. I will follow the sun by walking towards it as it peaks over the zenith and heads toward the horizon. The walk will meander the grid of the city while attempting to walk directly at this object in the sky, and eventually lead me out of the city. It will end at sunset. Maybe, in a different perspective, I am spending the day walking to the sunset. Throughout the day I will make photographs of the sun and publish them using my Twitter account. It will be a somewhat simultaneous distribution of the image of the sun (somewhat because there is always a delay). Time’s first visual image was the shadow of a sundial’s gnomon, cast from the sun, indicating the exact local time of a given area. In a sense, I am publishing these images of the sun as a kind of clock that follows local time. Here the digital image of the sun pretends to be its shadow… And unlike a sundial, which showed the local time only in that specific location, these shadows are distributed across the globe using digital communication. Pointing to the possibility of a plurality of time, and maybe, trying to find that different time.
This walk will happen today, July 25.
*June 27 was the day of the opening for Matter Out of Place. The photograph is available for free as a small print in the exhibition.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2012 at 10:51 am.