Optical commotion (Kaknästornet television tower Stockholm), 2007
Black and white slides, text

Performative reading (foto: Merel van ’t Hullenaar), 31.05.2007, 20.00h
TENT. Rotterdam, “Contemporary Passages” curated by Angela Serrino.

“The experience of changing place temporarily is one possible way of organizing the conscious perception of any aspect of daily, lived experience in its transitory form.”

In Optica Euklid noted that light travels in straight lines and described the law of reflection. He believed that vision involves rays going from the eyes to the object seen, and create a relationship between the apparent sizes of objects and the angles that they subtend at the eye. (300 BC)

“The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:

And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said, ‘What insects are those?’

At first I hardly understood, then I realized that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison…

When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies. (Turnbull 1963, 217)”

At the end of 2006, I found myself in an optical commotion with the tower, light, satellite dishes and their documentation at the end of a telescope’s era.