More on some of my favourite pieces from the 5,000,000,000 Years exhibition…
I always go to the Palais de Tokyo quite late (part of the charm of the place is that it closes at midnight) and walking through the exhibition rooms while very few visitors were around added an extra layer of strangeness to the pieces, in particular to Gone by monkey-maniac Tony Matelli. The chimpanzee was walking like a somnambulist in the dark.
Up in another room was “HIGGS” LHC CERN, a fascinating video by Switzerland-based artist Gianni Motti (you might remember him as the guy who made a soap bar from the fat of Silvio Berlusconi, he claimed to have bought it from a clinic where the ex-leader had a liposuction operation performed.) In 2005, the world year of physics, Motti decided to have a 27 km walk at one hundred meters below surface at the border between Switzerland and France near Geneva, in the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, CERN.
That same year, Motti was showing the Big Crunch Clock at the Venice Biennial. The digital clock counts the time separating the sun from its explosion (the big crunch) backwards. Ironically, the clock is designed to run on solar energy. The scientific efforts at CERN however turn back the clock to the Big Bang: the 27 km particle circuit complete with cathedral-sized experiment sites will bring us a step closer to the beginning of time, the origin of the universe.
“HIGGS” LHC CERN and Flying Tape
Jonathan Monk‘s Big Ben Piece is slowly screening slides of the London monument. The pictures are taken from post cards purchased from tourist shops. A computer tells the projector to show pictures of Big Ben at the exact moment pictured on the clock face. Each slide appears for one minute only.
The most surreal and poetical installation was Zilvinas Kempinas‘ Flying Tape: a group of 9 fans that enable the whole strip of a video tape to levitate in the room.
Five Billion Years runs until December 31 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.