HOW THE STARS STAND
2015
37 Day / 36 Martian sol PERFORMATIVE ACTION
ONLINE PLATFORM
LIVESTREAM
PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION + ARCHIVE
Our experience of time is not constant, rather, it flexes and yields to the specific nature of our passage through space. Bound to Earth, this concept seems imperceptible, for we know no time but our own. Yet as we chart our passage around the sun, revolving on our own familial axis, time operates differently elsewhere. Compelled by operations outside our experience, each planetary body moves in its own discrete cycles, heeding standards that are as foreign as they appear desultory.
How the Stars Stand is a test of the structures that time discreetly asserts — studying the physical ramifications that stem from making adjustments to the underlying axioms of time itself. An immersive, durational performance, How the Stars Stand requires a recalibration of ‘performative-time’ — measuring instead the local mean solar time as experienced on Mars. This act effects a 2.7% lengthening of the ‘performative-day’, with each cycle extended to represent a Martian ‘sol’. This alternative 24h 39m 35s cycle creates a shifting sense of ‘time’ against the Earth’s own rotation — with the passing of ‘hours’ shifting slowly against the passage of the sun. In order to fully ascertain the consequences of this dynamic, the performance was conducted for a palindromic cycle, allowing the experience of ‘time’ to drift completely out of sync, to invert and to slowly return to synchronicity — an action taking 37 days / 36 Martian ‘sols’ to complete.
How the Stars Stand was staged from July 15th – August 21st 2015 at Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), where I lived / worked / slept for the 36 ‘sol’ period — documenting my daily activities in both time and space, via a continuous live stream, and through the project’s website howthestarsstand.com.
Documentation of this performance was awarded ‘the churchie’ National Emerging Art Prize (AU) in 2016 and was a finalist in the Aesthetica Art Prize (UK) in 2017.