Designed specifically for the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan, An Hour of Infinity is part of my ongoing body of work investigating the timelessly beautiful imperfection inherent within the human experience of the Infinite.
Eight drawing performers were spread throughout the museum’s permanent collection. They drew circles in the Dynastic Egypt gallery on the ground floor, and lemniscates (the “figure eight” symbol for infinity) in the Roman gallery on the second floor. These performers attempted to represent the symbols for infinity accurately, but constantly made mistakes due to the nature of the unusual drawing process they were asked to execute.
Two surround sound installations used sounds recorded in the Kelsey Museum as their source material: the Egyptian gallery played sounds of footsteps on a creaky wooden floor in the original Kelsey Museum building, while the ancient Roman temple reconstruction on the second floor played sounds of drawers being opened and closed in the Kelsey’s off-limits basement archives.
Two musicians performed site-specific, hour-long scores: a score for guitar and electronic effects used reproduced paintings from a mysterious room in the ancient city of Pompeii as its source material, while the other score - for unaltered violin - repurposed the inscriptions of gibberish text on an ancient Babylonian incantation bowl as graphic notation.
By providing a series of fixed sonic points in time while foregrounding the active sounds of history that reverberated throughout the museum, this event challenged the members of the audience to analyze their own relationships with museums and with the experience of time itself.
Slideshow of photos from the making of “One Hundred Hours of Infinity”
Recording of a thunderstorm during hour seven of an eight hour circle drawing.
“…within the atmosphere of Wheeler’s “infinity environment,” your eyes are unable to determine how far or how near you are to the edge of the space. You see only a placeless white mist, both intimate and vast. Perceptually, it is like floating in space.”
How could nature ever be constrained into a picture?
The smallest bit of nature is infinite!
And so he paints what he likes about it.
And what does he like? He likes what he can paint! — Nietzsche
Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou discuss the making of their new graphic novel LOGICOMIX, the story of modern mathematics’ epic quest for truth.
“The fundamental basis of my work, to which I have dedicated my life, manifests itself in a process of recording a progression that both documents time and also defines it. It began on a single date in 1965, the one on which I undertook my first ‘Detail’. Each ‘Detail’ is a part of a greater idea conceived on that date. My work records the progression to infinity, through the first and the last number painted on the canvas.”
”’Time’ is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]”
“The Amduat (literally ‘That Which Is In the Afterworld’) is an important Ancient Egyptian funerary text of the New Kingdom. This book is an Ancient Egyptian cosmological treatise which describes the Tuat, the underworld that the boat of the Sun God, Ra, traverses during the night hours. Each chapter deals with one of the twelve hours of the night. A hallucinogenic travelogue of the netherworld, this extensively illustrated book depicts hundreds of gods and goddesses that appear nowhere else in the literature.”
“Marking Infinity presents the work of artist-philosopher Lee Ufan, charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on ‘the world as it is.’”
