Refractive Perspectives: 3*10^8 m/s
Group Exhibition
10-29 Jun 2024
Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL)
Vienna, Austria
The exhibition featured works from 20 artists from a variety of backgrounds in art and science, spanning from the socio-political to the deeply personal around the enigmatic topic of light.
A Seer, glazed stoneware, 2024
The ability of non-human animals to see in the dark can approach the absolute limits of physics. Their sensitivity for light can also differ between night and day, making mice, for example, more able to detect shadows in near-complete darkness than during the day. Reindeer, on the other hand, change the colour of their eyes in winter to better adapt to the blue conditions of the Arctic twilight. These, among countless other species, not only see into the shadows but also detect something humans still struggle to comprehend; they see us, too – and with frightening accuracy.
“At least everything goes on as though this troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that it had been experienced at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing.” (Derrida 2008, p. 14)
