Looking at the Sun

Looking at the Sun is an experimental film that translates the rare experience of a total solar eclipse onto the retina in a dialogue between light, perception, and memory.

The work explores a paradoxical relationship to the sun: a life-creating source of energy that, on visual inspection, irrevocably damages our optic nerves. It turns By emerging directly on the audience's retina, the process of seeing itself into material.

It discusses how light literally burns itself into our visual memory and how perception oscillates between external signals and internal constructs. In this controlled re-enactment of the dangerous gaze into the sun, the installation becomes a discourse on the limits and possibilities of human perception and the earthly economy of light.

Looking at the Sun takes form as a custom-made apparatus set in a darkened room: a transparent display, behind which a studio flash is mounted, acts as a retinal drawing machine. The audience experiences a film that follows an intimate journey of a solar eclipse—the memory of dry grass, the slow disappearance of light, and the dangerous moment of looking directly into the sun.

Every once in a while, a flash of light breaks through the darkness and projects ephemeral drawings directly onto the viewer's retina. The resulting afterimages are superimposed on the dark space like a collage, creating physically burned-in images that exist only in the eye of the beholder.

Preview on request.

Script

It’s the 8th of April. I am sitting on a meadow—somewhere on the border between Vermont and New York. I remember the touch of grass below me very well. Not soft, but harsh and surprisingly dry.

My view has been programmed. Everything I see is in relation to what I have been taught. Light bouncing off everything around me, transformed and sent as signals towards my brain. The so-called reverse inference: My brain constructs a world based on outer signals and past experiences. An artificial paradise of light.

The grass runs across the landscape in waves covering the small hills around me. We are getting ready for a rare astronomical event. One that they haven't witnessed since long before my time.

The sun is still here. It is too bright to look at it directly, as it would burn into my eyes. The ultraviolet rays would slowly decompose my retina's cellular structures. Eventually marking a permanent dark spot, where there once was light.

Overstimulation abandons the scale of light and darkness. It creates Afterimages beyond that range. Short term, alternative visions, partaking in the collage of perception. I am not trained to read them.

My eyes are alone with the sun. Protected by cheap cardboard frames and black polymer lenses they watch the moon slowly cover the light. It goes much slower than I expected, so I wait with the grass. At precisely 15:24, the sun gets so thin, it disappears.

I find myself in darkness. Uncertain of this loss of vision, I take off the glasses and peek around the meadow. It won’t tell if it’s dusk or dawn. So I dare to take a direct look up – to see with my own eyes:

A big ring of light is in the sky. The sun is so powerful that only once the last percent of it is covered—does the sky darken and the air cool. Energy worth over 25 hundred Atomic bombs a second bend around the moon. My gaze is attracted to the sun's atmosphere, but I am wary of its effect. I am caught looking straight into the source of our light. A burn would be unnoticed and painless.

I close my eyes. The sun is still with me - it blends visions of the past and future. Is there anything beyond light and darkness?

I am here—looking at the sun.