Five billion years...(5/10)

At the moment, Palais de Tokyo presents its five billion years project with interesting picks of contemporary artworks. It would be a one-year project and along the year to come, there would be moments when the 'isolated' time and space bring up reaction to possibilities...the use of the term 'parasites' for installation pieces is superbly true. The works give a life to the museum, and the museum hosts a continuation of recognition among arts, human and distance. There are parasitic entities existed in every domain of time flow and development, and I am definitely one of those in my life. Some installations are actually quite inspiring and interesting. One section of this five billion years displays imitated constellation photos of the eve of bombardment. Named the day before, it drew my opportunistic attention on my focused shadowplay on the dark side of the photos/drawings. It appeared to be a chasing night of hunters and preys before the attack of the next day.
Playing with running time, some works like twistle (2003) and glassworks (2006) were examining the collusion of seconds and senses. If you face it, you feel it. Flying tape (2006) by Zilvinas Kempinas is a floating tape of memory and record, and under the current, visitors experience a deviated pattern of the recording medium.

Message d'Andrée (2005) is my favorite of the collection. Joachim Koester captured the romantic-pathetic aspects of 'voyage polaire' - the exposure of lights and chance adventure initiated by the Swedish adventurer Salomon August Andrée. The story has been a glorified history of 'people vs nature' in the late 19th century, and during the race of adventurism in the era, Andrée got his support and funding from the movement of nationalism in Sweden, and he successfully launched out the plan to pass through the ice-land to the other side of the continent, but not the plan itself. This was a plot of human ambition perhaps. Something we may see unrealistic can be a golden rule in the past. In all cases, history repeats. Remastering the defect photos left by Salomon August Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel who lost their lives in 1897 during the attempt to fly over North Pole with their Örnen - a hydrogen balloon manufactured in the workshop of Henri Lachambre in Paris, Koester developed a moving image of black dots and bright lights with noise. This is the beauty of abstraction.