In deep antiquity, rhythms of the passage of light were marked by megalithic monuments or “pillars of light” across the globe that were intended to inscribe the experience of time through the codification of human relations to seasonal temporality, the cardinal, horizonal directions of East and West and the vertical sky of celestial lights.
Referencing these perennial cosmographies, monumental glass geometries can replace the prototypical calendrical technologies of stone with optical interfaces. Glass monoliths or ‘glyphs’ are oriented as axial points towards the rising and setting of stellar lights on the horizon's circle and their relational azimuth. Of these lights the sun is chief, being the symbol of consciousness, governing the temporalities of astronomical and seasonal cycles and illuminating experience. The universal symbol of the sun is also a double symbol: the model of light is that of the diametrical relation; both seasonal passage to opposite and the shadow of eclipse. Light is always doubled. Vision is both the vision of the inner eye of the mind and of the eyes of perception. The sun’s illumination is blinding to the direct gaze. We can’t look directly at the sun just as we can’t look directly towards the subject of our gaze; the seat of consciousness is a blind spot. The sun is always-already mediated in our experience. It is the producer of difference and differentiation, just as light is diffracted and refracted by media into spectral rays of colour. Working through mediation, light creates openings for spectralisation.
The ‘twilight language’ of optical patternation, which changes due to the individual’s orientation to the artwork, the sun, and to the flux of temporality, celebrates the opening of individual consciousness in relation to a cosmic time: a transformation of axial cycles through the multiplication of temporal experiences. The artwork provides an orientation in which the geographical and anthropological realities of contemporaneity are translated through the visionary dimension of a mandala in which the cardinal, horizontal directions are orientated to the vertical dimension of supra-sensory light. Against the crisis of mono-technological culture, the work multiplies cosmotechnics in support of a corresponding diversification of forms of coexistence: “before the falling of dusk” - Yuk Hui.
(adapted from 2017 text)