Home-Work

Mathias Pfund

HOME-WORK #5 : Hollowed Out

foam, fabric, cool white light

Visible since October 17th 2016

Mathias Pfund

HOME-WORK #5 : Hollowed Out

foam, fabric, cool white light

Visible since October 17th 2016

Mathias Pfund

HOME-WORK #5 : Hollowed Out

foam, fabric, cool white light

Visible since October 17th 2016

La proposition Hollowed Out s'inscrit dans le projet photographique plus vaste Modernism (haunted) et en constitue le quatrième élément. Il s'agit d'une série de 5 photographies de sculptures en bas-relief aux formes abstraites, organiques, réalisées en polystyrène. Elles évoquent à la fois une branche abstraite de la sculpture moderne ainsi que des fantômes, tel que leur titre le suggère.

En l'occurrence, pour Home-Work, l'intervention consiste en l'encastrement d'une fine plaque en polystyrène – matériau d'isolation – dans l'espace de la fenêtre. Les ouvertures curvilignes constituent une contreforme à l'architecture orthogonale du bâtiment et laissent filtrer la lumière diurne. Le ressaut de la façade, entourant la fenêtre, délimite un cadrage, dans lequel l'ectoplasme est saisi furtivement, à la manière d'un close-up.

Le fantôme est également visible de nuit, depuis la Place des Volontaires, grâce à une ampoule cool light émanant de la chambre, activée selon l'activité nocturne de Quentin.

– Mathias Pfund, October 2016.

Modernism (haunted) I @ HIT, Genève. Photo : Etienne Chosson Modernism (haunted) II @ LAC Scubadive, Vevey. Photo : Eliot Roch Modernism (haunted) III @ Les Ouches, Genève. Photo : Bruno Aeberli

(the universe is a big man and man a little universe)

“Man and the cosmos are […] like two mirrors, each reflecting the other.”

– Titus Burckhardt

Almost two years ago I created a camera obscura in my bedroom. A camera obscura is an enclosed space, completely dark except for one hole that lets the light come in. You can make one with a shoe box, or, like I did, with a room. I used a lot of gaffer tape and old dark blue curtains to obstruct the three meters high windows, then lied down on the bed. I saw the sky on my legs and chimneys up on my belly. I heard cars passing down in the street and in the same moment saw them moving across the ceiling, along with people passing by. I wondered at this upturned world and I thought, that is how you unveil reality. How you leap into the reflection in the pond and see the other side of the world. I am an eye inside an eye, and the universe can fit in my bedroom.

When I first came to rue Coulouvrenière, 26, I slept on a mattress in an unoccupied bedroom. I woke up early, dawn reflecting on the bare grey walls, silent. The windows, like a cinema screen, offered a view across the river ; boat-like buildings moored along the Rhône, quiet morning light, birds, and on one of the terraces, a tree. I liked that tree. I thought that it would be a nice place to make a camera obscura. The windows are short and large, the room is almost cubic, and the apartment is high up above the street, with a perfect view on the friendly tree.

Instead of following the HOME-WORK project's initial guidelines, I created something that one can only see from the inside. This time I used vinyl to occlude the window's view. To signify the presence of my installation, I drew an eye with phosphorescent tape on the outside.

I've invited people to sit in the room, waiting for their eyes to adapt to the obscurity, for them to understand what it is that they’re seeing, for it to take them by surprise, because it always does. Finally, I made these stop motion videos in an attempt to share the awe. But the only true way of experiencing this installation is to make a camera obscura yourself, and then lie down on the bed.

- Alexia Chandon-Piazza, July 2015.

Alexia Chandon-Piazza

HOME-WORK #4 : (the universe is a big man and man a little universe)

camera obscura, adhesive vinyl, phosphorescent tape, natural light

Visible from May 22nd to June 22nd 2015

Alexia Chandon-Piazza

HOME-WORK #4 : (the universe is a big man and man a little universe)

camera obscura, adhesive vinyl, phosphorescent tape, natural light

Visible from May 22nd to June 22nd 2015

Alexia Chandon-Piazza

HOME-WORK #4 : (the universe is a big man and man a little universe)

camera obscura, adhesive vinyl, phosphorescent tape, natural light

Visible from May 22nd to June 22nd 2015

No Dreams, No Logic

A human lies with eyes open, in a bedroom, a vacuum, walls and floors lined with the most light absorbent material, the blackest black, retinas replaced with the retinas of a frog. In the center of the long dark room is a barrier, a wall with two slits cut in it. At one end, opposite the para-human, beyond the barrier, is a light source. Bars of light and bars of the absence of light — shadows cast through the two slits —collect in alternating soft stripes on the wall behind the human, brightest in the center and progressively dimmer as they repeat out to the edges. The bedroom is stretched to one hundred million kilometers long. The light’s intensity is greatest near its source. Here, photons are most densely packed together, but at the other end of the room, the space between the billions of photons emitted has grown so big that they can be individually perceived as flickering blips by the frog retinae. To a human without these amphibian eyes, it would appear to be dark. A button is pressed. The bedroom is bedroom-size again. The wall behind the human, with stripes of light and shadow cast on it, opens to reveal a photomultiplier (PMT), a vacuum phototube light detector much more sensitive than a frog retina. The light is dimmed and a green filter is placed in front causing the rate of green photons passing through to drop dramatically. Though the PMT detects millions of photon events per second, it can tell that only one photon at time is in the chamber. Peering at the millions of blips accumulating in dotted stripes on the PMT, the homo-anura ponders why, when individual photons pass through the two slits, they do not agglomerate in two lines. There is no such thing as individual. She slumps over in a wash of red dots. The standing world becomes the lying down world. With eyes closed the augmented human sees shadow photons — those invisible partners of the palpable photons that must be passing through the opposite slit and colliding with the visible photons before they hit the PMT, thus causing even lone energy particles to accumulate as an interference pattern on the glass of the photomultiplier. And those invisible photons exist in a parallel invisible universe that the human now sees. It is therefore the lying down world, through the mind’s frog eye, that offers passage to the plural universe: the pluriverse.

- Hunter Longe, May 2015.

Hunter Longe

HOME-WORK #3 : No Dreams, No Logic

light installation, LED strip lights, foam board, fabric, slide projector, fan,1,33 x 1,21 m

Visible from March 2nd to May 17th 2015, from nightfall to midnight.

Note on the double slit experiment

Many iterations of the “double slit experiment” have been used to demonstrate various and changing attributes of light and particles over the last two centuries. In early versions, monochromatic light was directed at a barrier with two parallel slits in it. A screen on the other side would catch not two bars of light, but alternating stripes of light and shadow. This is explained as an interference pattern in which the beams of light, after passing through the slits, interfere with one another causing multiple lines of light. When two more slits are cut in the barrier, fewer lines of light appear on the other side. Initially this exhibited that light functions like a wave. A similar same set-up was used again in early quantum mechanics to demonstrate wave-particle duality — the postulate that particles in a group act like a wave. An experiment was done in which individual photons were fired at a barrier with two and then four slits. After thousands of photons events are detected at the screen, the same interference pattern is revealed — photons only hit the screen in particular places leaving gaps between more condensed areas, like the stripes of light and shadow from the early experiments (see video by Dr. Tonomura of the same experiment done with electrons). The conclusion is that there must be some invisible attribute of the particle that causes interference, that causes it to have this wave-function. In his book, Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch refers to the invisible interference-causing entities as “shadow photons.” He explains that in these light experiments, “there can be places in a shadow-pattern that go dark when new openings are made in the barrier casting the shadow. This remains true when the experiment is performed with individual particles. A chain of reasoning based on this fact rules out the possibility that the universe we see around us constitutes the whole of reality.” This logic takes quantum theorists to the notion of the multiverse. If every photon has a “shadow photon,” that shadow photon must also have a shadow photon and every one of those shadow photons must exist its own shadow universe. Deutsch says, “In fact the whole of physical reality is a multiverse that contains vast numbers of parallel universes” (Deutstch,1997).

Quentin Lannes

HOME-WORK #2 : H Building

light installation, fluorescent lamps, filters,1,33 x 1,21 m

Visible from September 8th 2014 to February 26th 2015, from nightfall to midnight.

Quentin Lannes

HOME-WORK #2 : H Building

Morning sunlight projecting geometrical shapes on the bedroom wall for a few minutes.

Quentin Lannes

HOME-WORK #2 : H Building

Inside view of the second installation on the fifth floor of 26 Coulouvrenière St., Geneva.

Quentin Lannes

HOME-WORK #1 : After Eggleston, after anonymous

light installation, fluorescent lamps, adhesive vinyl, filters, roll-upblind,1,33 x 1,21 m

Visible from May 27th to August 31th 2014, from nightfall to midnight.

Quentin Lannes

HOME-WORK #1 : After eggleston, after anonymous

Inside view of the installation on the fifth floor of 26 Coulouvrenière St., Geneva.