Milestone I

This installation is broadly concerned with the meaning of the concept “milestone”. It raises the question whether setting precise milestones for the functioning and rules of society is meaningful, making a comparison with the logic and relations of nature. In exploring this theme, it also draws on fuzzy logic (precise theory of imprecise transitions).

Our ideal milestone is commonly understood to be synonymous with a precise boundary used as a simple starting point for determining additional rules. We thus define approximate, yet strict milestones which results in a system constructed within rigid boundaries that does not function naturally and correctly. Whenever we try to delimit clear, fixed rules, a problem appears sooner or later and the boundary has to be shifted crudely in response. Nature functions more effectively, however, since it takes into account aspects and circumstances which we do not see, or do not have the capacity to detect at the right moment.

The suspended installation Milestone is a general representation of a personal attitude to unnaturally established boundaries. Or, to be more precise, it places in sharp focus the details of a would-be “fixed” milestone, which must systemically be viewed as a constant and chosen point of truth. This point is deliberately expressed as a chaotic explosion in extreme slow motion. The commonly perceived temporal level of exploding physical material is here frozen in time, leading to the appearance of unknown oscillating facets of frequencies on the surface, which at first glance remain concealed from us. This also means that in general we cannot depend on them in determining the true state of things.

The shape of the video-sculpture is also reminiscent of subatomic particles exploding after a collision in an accelerator, or of their behaviour on the margins of a black hole in the so-called “event horizon”, which conceals a logic that is hard for us to comprehend. Theoretically, nature in this situation arrests even the most rapid events affecting the body undergoing absorption with respect to the outside observer, and this probably includes the oscillation of elementary particles. Other interesting sub-frequencies thus appear to which we are normally blind.

For the time being, these hidden details thus become merely an inspiration for evaluating where the precise, yet still fuzzy - in the ideal case “flexibly suspended” - position of the milestone lies. Such nuances also determine the detailed functioning of nature, of which our understanding is still limited. However, we need to build on them more often. “The truth” is determined by an enormous multitude of circumstances and comes in many versions, and unless we perceive them in all of their temporal, as well as subliminal, aspects and contexts, we cannot call them the truth.