LAUF DER ZEIT (Course of Time)

2020| installation | 7m x 3,7m x 0,5m | aluminium truss, electric motor, lamp, computer control, cables, etc.

After a day at your desk, you take a car to the fitness center, then take the elevator to the second floor to work out and feed an app with your successful performance. Our highly technological everyday life takes on absurd features. We live in a digitalized world in which we can hardly imagine a life without gadgets, apps and intelligent navigation systems. Driving from Berlin to Munich without a navigation system? Even on a walk in the nearby city forest, where the pedometer is a must, you can hardly find your way home without cell phone navigation.
However, since we spend less and less time outdoors and navigation systems have become an integral part of our everyday life, it is high time to create a gadget that on the one hand reflects the absurdities of this development and on the other hand offers orientation in an increasingly complex world: I have developed a "sun lamp" that brings the sun into the interior. This artificial sun is programmed in such a way that it starts to glow slowly at the same time as the real sun in the morning through a dimmer and imitates the dawn. At the exact time of sunrise, the artificial sun makes its way from east to west along a track, always following the exact position of the sun, only to set at the same time as the sun. The installation of the sun lamp has a width of about 7 meters and is built on the exact east-west axis.
Through my travels I became aware that there are also other forms of orientation. In Latin America I have often received directions with a reference to cardinal points. However, I did not know where the east was, in whose direction I should go after the second junction. In 2004, when I walked from Flensburg through the whole of Germany to Basel in two months on foot and without money, without a compass or hiking map, always heading south, my sense of orientation was established after a few weeks. Even on cloudy days I knew where south was. These experiences made me realize that orientation can be learned, that it slumbers within us, as long as we spend a lot of time outdoors and do not rely on modern navigation systems.
Through the exact imitation of the sun in the interior, a person who spends a lot of time in the same room can constantly follow the position of the sun, consciously and unconsciously, and thus internalize the cardinal points in the interior as well. The installation is conceived for both the exhibition context and the living space and is thus an object that oscillates between design, conceptual art and modern gadget. At the same time, the "course of time" takes up the rapid technical developments and refers to their social relevance by exaggeration.

Implementation: Bernhard Sting
Programming: Christoph Blattmacher
3D drawing: Christophe Mathieu