Last Performance on Taksim square

Performance in front of the Cumhuriyet Gallery

Performance at Taksim Square Istanbul

during performance

and after

Istanbul performance: date and time

Ivar van Bekkum will perform a Spiral at Taksim Square in Istanbul on the early morning of  September 16.

You are cordially invited to be present during the performance.  The performance will start half an hour before sunrise (6:15) and continues till noon.

Any changes will be published here.

Reactions of passers-by

A test by Ivar on the square behind our Studio

Women: “You must have made this machine yourself. What’s in the bottle, gasoline?”

Ivar: “It runs on solar energy”

Women “Uhu, so without the sand it would work the same?

Ivar: “Exactly the same, only you would not see the history, its path”

Women “ Ahhhhh! So the sand is even more a work of art as the machine is…

Spiral Drawing Sunrise coming soon to Istanbul.

We will be performing a Spiral Drawing Sunrise in Istanbul between 14 and 20 Sept as part of ISEA2011.
The exact locations and (early morning) times will be published as soon as they are decided on.
To give you an indication:

Noortje Marres log 3-3: After

But to return to the prints – one thing I liked about them, was when people visited and recognized them from the video recording of the Spiral Drawing Sunrise event in Amsterdam, which I showed a couple of times during lectures. In these talks, I drew on the experiment to make a particular argument, presenting it as a particular kind of device of “environmental participation”. What interested me there was  the way in which the robot cart making its recording of the sunrise enacted the environment in a particular way: it turned the square, the passing bank employees, the rising sun and so on into a happening place. Making its circles, the robot cart amplified all the movements making up the setting, rendering this location in and as movement. In doing so, Spiral Drawing Sunrise suggested a very different way

Noortje Marres log 2: After

Also, while the prints where still here, a sunflower arrived on the windowsill of our living room: one we had not planted, but just started to grow there one day. It was a funny coincidence, as in trying to think and write about Spiral Drawing Sunrise, I had read about a sunflower clock: a 17th century device developed by the Anthanasius Kircher, which relied on a turning sunflower – which followed the sun – to indicate the time (Hankins & Silverman, 1995).  There are many connections with spiral drawing sunrise: it is another sun-centred device that does clock-work, and in this way, gives us a way of doing clock time with a natural setting, rather than requiring disconnection from it. Anyway, I initially did not make these connections between sunflower and sunflower clock and prints: – as we had not planted it, we did not know

Noortje Marres Log 3-1: After

We had the prints of the Frederiksplein Spiral Drawing Sunrise hanging on the wall in our living room in London for about a year. Now they are gone, as I brought them back to Amsterdam on the Eurostar. Actually they have been gone for a while, but I have been putting off writing up my experience of them, as I had promised Esther I would. I was busy, of course, but possibly too because writing things up would mean the end of the experiment, and that is what I wanted to put off. But there is this question to answer: How was it to live with these prints for a year, did they produce or in any way enable the effect that Esther and I speculated they might, namely to “transport the Amsterdam sunrise to my London home”?

To be honest, it was probably less the location where we conducted the drawing exercise, – the Frederiksplein -, than the device of the spiral drawing sunrise itself, the solar

Noortje Marres Log 2-3: During

What’s on record

One question that I am still unclear about it is how much of this place, the Frederiksplein, is actually captured by the records that the spiral drawing sunrise exercise eventually produces. On the one hand, the list of things that are in some sense “site-specific” and have influenced the course of the robot cart is quite long. To begin with, the intensity of the sunlight actually makes a difference. Esther brought a lightmeter and it is clear that an equatorial or winter sunrise would produce very different levels of light intensity, and thus a different pattern.