Residual light
A visual experience, a small miracle in the palm of your hand or on the table, and the moment when the mind stops being fascinated with aesthetics and begins to move from the vanishing moment and reflect on our relationship with the world. A small evening “happening” in a moment of silence, when a person becomes tired after a day of wakefulness, and comes to perceive fleeting moments. The moment, when the energy of the hot water of the cooling drink is being transformed into a small light, is a medicine for our ecological conscience.
I can’t pinpoint the exact genre of this little experiment, but it certainly oscillates somewhere between light art, happening, design, and work on the border of art & science. It is an intimate, functional, kind and, last but not least, ecologically oriented gesture. A short visual “haiku” about the hidden possibilities of known technologies. About the untapped possibilities of residual energies all around us.
Socio-ecological aspect
The heat that our civilization releases into the atmosphere through industrial production, electricity consumption or insufficient use of natural resources, results in global climate disruption. It is the price we pay for the comfort we live in and the technological possibilities we have mastered before we realized their impact.
This “thermal” fact is well known and essentially accepted and is not given as serious a weight as, for example, the production of carbon gases. Paradoxically, however, the heating of the atmosphere results, for example, in the mass release of CO2 from mineral waters and glaciers, which makes up a much larger percentage of total CO2. Although the total CO2 content in the atmosphere is approximately 0,0407%, its concentration in the upper layers causes the so-called greenhouse effect – retention of heat in the atmosphere which cyclically causes its greater release and so on. So we come to the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, which, in addition to its periodic non-solution, raises the question of what we can do about it.
After several confrontations and reflections and an unforgettable lecture by Mr. František Simančík in a scientific café in Košice, I understood, on the one hand, a certain complex helplessness in solving this situation and on the other, a vain artistic “I” woke up in me. Encouraged by this, I decided to create a memento, a small material reminder.
This workshop is part of the Urban Exploration event organized as part of the Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities project which is supported using public funds provided by the Slovak Arts Council and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.