The eternal swirl is a found image of a gigantic swirl in the Indian Ocean I found on weather page based on satellite by accident. I didn't make a note about where it was located as I found it unnecessary, because swirls tend to move and the location was not the point of me getting interested in cutting it. It was eternally frozen as image - that captured me! A swirl with the dimension of approximately 50 to 100 meters is spectacular, of course, but just for those who are close enough to witness it in real. To me, on the screen of my laptop it was just a spiral in the sea. Also this swirl probably wouldn't have make big news (who knows, I didn't follow up his development and history - way too much research for something which most likely disappeared quickly after the satellite passed by). On the other hand, how big is the chance to find a swirl of these dimensions on a map in the internet you never visited before, opening the page, pointing somewhere with the cursor and zoom in. I can't even tell why I did so, why I opened the website... A blast of coincidences which left me with my personal eternal swirl. I felt and still feel extremely lucky to have found this very special natural phenomenon in the flood of information we are all swimming in.
For the execution I decided to eliminate some layers of coincidence to the viewers. The decision to distort the image without manipulating it. So I cutted 19 pages of DIN A5 millimeterpaper, moving from top to bottom by cutting just a few lines of the paper, take the next one doing the next few lines at the logically right position and so on. The single pages I positioned on a russian fishing net as a swirl within the exhibition.
Knowing that it is impossible to bring the lines together as one image in the eye of the viewer the piece is my comment towards the flood of information. Yes, we are overwhelmed by this too much, but also we need it. We need informations of all kinds, to be aware about the gamble of politics, the global lobbyism, the destructive forces of the climate change. We need informations about the decency of mankind, the beauty of nature, the wonders of art and science and we definitely need surprises and secrets to grow.
If you want to know more about the exhibition "muted flood" which accidentally turned into a one night event, just click here.
St. & St. | Viktoria Ikonen | Nobushige Kono
HORS, St. Petersburg/ Russia