Spiral Drawing Sunrise

Last Performance on Taksim square

Esther — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:16:16 +0000

Performance in front of the Cumhuriyet Gallery

Esther — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:35:44 +0000

Performance at Taksim Square Istanbul

Esther — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 06:11:45 +0000

during performance

and after

Istanbul performance: date and time

Esther — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:49:21 +0000

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.

Exact location: Taksim Square near the entrance to İstiklal Caddesi and in front of The Cumhuriyet Art Gallery
ISEA2011 ISTANBUL – The 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
The performance is supported by Mondriaan Foundation

Reactions of passers-by

Esther — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:51:11 +0000

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.

Esther — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:18:18 +0000

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

noortjemarres — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:11:33 +0000

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 of approaching “the environment” than the more customary ‘static’ understanding of it. In social studies of ‘public engagement with the environment.’ the environment all too frequently figures as a static marker of damage done – X tons of carbon; X miles of food, X species extinct. Spiral Sunrise does the environment differently: it tells us that in order to render a distant environment like the sun present in the here and now, it is crucial to capture its movement. It rendered the environment as a happening, to use a term Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford proposed.

But finding these prints in our living room made for different kinds of connections.
The sheets were much bigger on our wall then on the ground in the square. Something to do with the size of London apartments, obviously – but also something about the proportions one expects a record to have in relation to the recorded – one doesn’t expect them to be life-sized. Also, on our wall the analogy with planetary movements seemed even more obvious. The trace of the cart in sand dots: like so many snapshots of the planets on their course. What mostly stands out, then, is movement. It was a good reminder for me: in order to make points, it is not always necessary to freeze phenomena – points can be made in and as motion. Which is perhaps easy to say, but not necessarily easy to realize for someone who spends so much time sitting still at a desk, as I do.

Noortje Marres log 2: After

noortjemarres — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:19:16 +0000

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 what this thing was, and for a long time were convinced it would be a thistle, and later – when it just kept growing and the head appeared – a big thistle. At first I thought of this plant as some kind of stork, seemlingly arriving out of nowwhere (though we later found out that neighbours two houses down have a whole patch of sunflowers). The point is,
our simple sunflower is doing clock-work too, it measures time through its growth and opening petals, and thereby generating a sense of extension in time.

Noortje Marres Log 3-1: After

noortjemarres — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:24:05 +0000

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 robot-drawing machine, which continued to capture my imagination by way of these prints (the video recording is another matter – see below). Being continuously reminded of the figure of the spiralling dots, while walking back to the kitchen, and so on, it became very easy to imagine things in my life to be shaped like one, like a spiral sunrise. I am 8 months pregnant, which means that I am getting rounder, and going slower, by the day. A bit like a snail I thought at first, but then, I realized, much like a spiral sunrise too (though I am still not going as slow as the sun). Or perhaps a spiral sunrise in reverse: as my action radius is shrinking continously, not growing – though the baby’s is growing of course.

Noortje Marres Log 2-3: During

noortjemarres — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:14:07 +0000

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. Then there are also the particularities of the robot cart’s immediate surroundings: the curvature of the square’s surface, the shade provided by buildings and trees, us walking around blocking the sunlight: all this influences the pattern. (At one point, I stand in front of the sun, to slow the cart down, so as to get it to deposit another dot of sand on the middle sheet…not quite willing, to embrace the ‘less is more’ effect.) And I am also glad to notice that the wheels of the cart have left some traces of street grime on the paper. (Emilie Gomart would say, the more bias built into this experimental record, the better.) Finally, what I had not counted on at all: two dogs, one pigeon, and one man rolling a cigarette, walk straight through the sand pattern, with the last one leaving two big imprints, or rather smutches, doing quite some damage. I had not really thought about this beforehand – though, again, I am quite sure Esther had: the fragility of the pattern. This is perhaps clearest at the moment when the municipal cleaning services show up. (Of course, its the first Monday of the month.) The men and the cars they drive are equipped with brushes, which take on quite an ominous aspect in the face of the thin lines of sand on the ground. However we relax when we realize that one of the cleaning trucks is driving in circles around us and the sand spiral in-the-making. But it is to say that a lot of the action of this morning stems from things that could have left their trace in this drawing, but eventually don’t: Calanne’s dog, the carts of the cleaning services.