Strikes at Time and the magic of tungsten
Strikes at Time is an installation with 2 channel video projection and audio by Raqs Media Collective. The work weaves together found text from a worker’s diary with annotations from Jacques Rancière’s The Nights of Labor, that transpose thoughts on the experience of time through fatigue, twilight, and mythology. Somehow the work makes sense of lost time. At times still, lucid, and slow, whilst at others, jittery, fast, and tumultuous.
Anarchic dreams know no limit. Everything else was ordinary.
Holding all the beauty of a Rembrandt still life and the atmosphere of a Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich, Strikes at Time is a haunting allegory for experiencing twilight — in all its tenebrous timelessness. Like the nature of twilight, this work shows connections between all of us, the same sky, the same change, the same glazed fatigue in finishing a long day. After seeing this at the Whitworth in 2017 — as part of Raqs Media Collective’s first major UK show, I was mesmerised by it’s atmospheric qualities — a trance or feeling of reverie was encountered by absorbing myself into it.
The video resonates with deep ultramarine blue and warm incandescent orange. The orange is particularly evocative and after seeing this work, ordinary street lights are illuminated in my mind. I walk home after a long day under an incandescent glow that seems to soothe and nourish, like candlelight, should I choose to bathe in it’s rich tungsten flare. My experience of nocturnal street light is one of slowness, warmth, and longing. Longing perhaps for the warmth of my home, the promise of tomorrow, or the unwritten poetry of today.
This orange glow is being broken up more and more as time goes by, with units of white LED. City councils around the world have begun to replace the energy hungry sodium bulbs conventionally found in street lights, with white LEDs which are said to be up to 50% more energy efficient and reduce reliance on fossil fuels — a decision for which local authorities unarguably deserve celebration. LEDs also last much longer — as much as ten times longer in fact. They are however, not without their problems. First generation LED street lights have been declared by the American Medical Association as being potentially harmful to both humans and animals, suppressing melatonin needed for deep sleep in humans, whilst producing disorientating affects in animals because of the blue light they transit that is not recognised by the human eye. It has even been said that this could cause and enhance wider problems such as obesity because of sleep deprivation.
There is of course, the other factor, that they are just not quite as nice to look at.
This feeling is heightened by the fact that bulbs are being replaced one-by-one, rather than all-at-once. So the time we live in, where sodium and LED bulbs sit side-by-side is a temporary moment — an in-between time.
What we gain from the technology of LED, we lose in the nourishing orange glow of sodium. We should certainly herald the end for our reliance on fossil fuels and of course, we should make decisions that sustain for the future, rather than for cheap consumption by the present.
Make no mistake — technology is vital for dealing with the climate crisis faced by the world and the problems associated with early LEDs are most certainly temporary problems that will be forgotten when the technology becomes more advanced. I am curious nonetheless, about who makes the decisions around how places should feel to residents after the necessary new technology is implemented and how are these decisions made? What can art tell us about the sort of neighbourhoods in which we want to live and how we want them to feel?
References
Raqs Media Collective, Raqs Media Collective: Casebook, Toronto, 2014
AMA adopts guidance to reduce harm from high intensity street lights, 14th June 2016 https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-adopts-guidance-reduce-harm-high-intensity-street-lights
