Until Then Then, a group exhibition at Western Front (Vancouver BC) that ran February - April 2006. The show explored ideas of time as a problematic, looking critically at nostalgia and future utopias. Curated by Jonathan Middleton.
Timing Is Everything
2 x 48” diameter mirrors
2006
Timing Is Everything - mirror detail
mirror with reverse sandblasted image of the astrological birth charts of Voyager I & II, text panels, wood mirror frame, wooden bench
2 x 48” diameter mirrors
2006
Until Then Then exhibition at Western Front Timing Is Everything - mirror reflection detail
2 x 48” diameter mirrors
2006
Until Then Then exhibition at Western Front Timing Is Everything - text panel detail
mirror w/ reverse sandblasted image of the astrological birth charts of Voyager I & II, text panels, wood mirror frame, wooden bench
2 x 48” diameter mirrors
2006
The following text is Part I and Part II, as seen above.
Part I
The future is coming everyday and depending on who you talk to, the future is something that has already happened. Time and space are a human construct. It’s kind of difficult for us to imagine this but if the reality that we exist in can be considered a node on a linear bandwidth, the next station over may not have need for a physical body let alone the concept of time and space. Have you ever had a dream that was so astonishingly real that as you were dreaming it you understood that you were cognizant but then forced yourself out of that state to enter waking life? Lucid dreaming is another level of consciousness that we use regularly without fully understanding or even remembering. It comes back in vague stills that are difficult to articulate often leaving things left unsaid.
Part II
Voyager 1 & 2 were sent up into outer space during the US initiated space program of the 1970’s. NASA recognized a rare planetary alignment at the turn of the 70’s that would happen by the end of the decade. Plans were quickly made to commission a time capsule of the planet earth to send into deep space. Pop culturally referred to as The Golden Record, Carl Sagan and a crew of 11 scientists and cultural thinkers were given the task of representing all of humanity for future posterity in the wilds of the new frontier. This happened at a time when the US government would publicly denounce the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. This possibility was largely funded by the same body politic that denied it, leaving transparent contradictions that rely on a state of collective forgetting and enthusiasm for progress.
What we have been told is that it is estimated that it will take at least 140,000 light years for either Voyager 1 or 2 to come into contact with another life form. Unexpectedly, NASA still has contact with the ships in the night sky – a happy surprise resulting in continued communication until the year 2020. We also know that the twin Voyagers are in the Milky Way and that the first one is nearing Pluto at a distance of 9 billion miles from the sun – currently the most distant human-made object in the universe. And Voyager 2, currently at a distance of 7 billion miles from the sun, remains the only spacecraft ever to have visited the worlds of Neptune and Uranus.
Using the astrological birth charts of these two space probes, I have been asking practitioners of alternative modulations who have particular skills to aid my quest to see how things are moving along for the Voyagers and to see what the future may hold for our own footprint on the future.
Until Then Then exhibition at Western Front Timing Is Everything - text panel detail
mirror with reverse sandblasted image of the astrological birth charts of Voyager I & II, text panels, wood mirror frame, wooden bench
2 x 48” diameter mirrors
2006
The following is the text on the third text panel, as seen above.
Part III
I visited with a Clairvoyant, a tarot reader, some friends who do lucid dreaming, a local nutritionist healer who is preparing to leave the matrix in 2017 and a retired Hindu priest who spends a lot of time looking at the stars. Under the auspices of a single question; Can you tell me what is happening or going to happen to Voyager 1 & 2?, we got down to some essential ponderings about human existence.
The most concrete prediction came from the tarot reader who was able to calculate the launch time, date and location to come up with a possible response to my question. Based on this information she predicts that Voyager 1 will only be remembered when we have completely forgotten about it on earth – when the event becomes myth. Voyager 2; however, has a very different fate that may happen within this lifetime. She likened the event to a very bright star in the night sky that will be of questionable origin. Here on earth, we may be confused by what we see in the sky and it will be received with speculation. Something will illuminate the Voyager 2 to learn about it. This backlit casting of the object will brighten the sky and become noticeable from our viewpoint but will remain under discussion for lengthy periods with no definitive explanation.
The nutritionist healer refuted the tarot reader’s findings based on the charts she followed to calculate her predictions claiming that the only accurate way to really do this would be a method he currently won’t practice due to it’s time consuming nature. He did however use the metaphor of a finished painting to describe our existence. The entire canvas is complete and we as humans are limited because we are only ever able to focus on one part of the painting at any given time; however our entire existence, according to him, is happening simultaneously.
The Clairvoyant revealed a reading of my past lives with one that currently relates to my present research and practice. In 17th century Spain I was a Scientist with a focus on Astrology and had spent a lifetime doing countless experiments. At the end of my life, I had come to the conclusion that there was no difference between God and Science – they were one in the same. This has an interesting relationship to this idea of the spirit realm that she had referred to and I had asked her about. She went on to describe it as a realm that doesn’t recognize time and space and that spirits want to inhabit human bodies in order to continue their lessons toward enlightenment. Like spirits make contracts with each other to fulfill on the earth realm – we have lessons to learn and teach each other and we make alliances with spirits from past lives in order to continue through this process.
I spoke with some friends who have done lucid dreaming and we talked about some of our experiences in the dream world. The key is to revoke waking life logic in order to fully control actions done in a state of slumber. Once successful, you can rapidly proceed to higher stages that are entirely triggered by your ability to think. The clearer your body is of substances that slow it down, the better the opportunity you have to direct your dreaming. To reach the higher levels is likened to a video game – the higher you go, the purer the essence of your soul – this is where things get super cool. This is the stage where any signifiers that we understand in our waking life are entirely dematerialized leaving our spirit self as a glowing orb in a vast universe of stars.
And the star gazing priest replied, timing is everything.