Ariel C. Wilson + Matt Kowal: from where the sun is, to wherever you are

As Earth spins, the sun is perpetually rising on one horizon and setting on another. Most people experience this only in passing—each morning and evening, from a single vantage point.

Ariel C. Wilson and Matt Kowal’s exhibition, from where the sun is, to wherever you are, opens up the horizon, tracing it around the globe through live imagery drawn from twenty-four webcams placed across the earth’s time zones and woven into a single continually cycling composition. Day progresses into night and back into day, punctuated by sunrise, sunset, and the occasional appearance of the moon and distant stars.

The cameras move exceptionally slowly, capturing images at six to sixty frames per hour, rather than the thirty to sixty frames per second of conventional video, producing footage that is striated, incremental, and abstract. The medium does not disappear. Code, global connectivity, projector light, and pixels reveal themselves in the images, capturing the digital infrastructures through which many people now reach toward the natural world. For Wilson and Kowal, the pixelation is not a failure of resolution, but an honest account of the distance between experience and representation.

Special thanks to composer Carey Campbell for sound design and to Weber State University students and staff for contributing their voices to the installation.