Your Sky Machine is the first experiment of the Sky Window Series, an exploration of time, distance, intimacy, memory in conversation of the tangible and the intangible, the physical and the virtual.
See the other experiments here: Your Weather Machine
We, among all the living creatures on Earth, are obssessed with light. Light is food. Light evokes emotional econnection. Light is spiritual. Deer freeze in light. Moths dart into the fire. Human beings travel all the way to the mountains and the sea to seek the pure senses of sunrise and sunset.
When you enter an interior space, your remaining connection with the outside world, with light, with sky is through the window. Through openings and occlusions, the architect frames your view, frames your light for you. The world is no longer vast, endless, overwhelming. It becomes the rectangular space on your wall.
There’s the unique comfort in seeing the world through a rectangle. Part of the comfort comes from a sensory reaction. When your view is limited, your eyes could more easily find an anchor point. When the visual information is purer, the senses are purer. You could more keenly observe the the color of the sky, the growth of the tree, the volume and quality of light shifting across time as light patches and shadows travel around your room.
Part of the comfort comes from an emotional response. After looking at the same opening for a period of time, you cultivate a sense of intimacy with this tiny patch of the world. The rectangle on the wall brings a patch of the world into your territory. Through the window, we find comfort and intimacy in the vast, fleeting outside world and experience the immensity within us.
From James Turell’s Sky Space to Olafur Elliasson’s Weather Project, there’s the attempt to bring the Sun, the sky into our territory and to build a space of pure senses. Viewers described their experiences to be transcending as they, in the position of looking at the Sun moving across the room, are reminded of their own position as a creature located on Earth, spining around the Sun.
Through Your Sky Machine, I hope to pack this experience into a portable 6*6*4” box and carry it with me. I chose to present the framed view as a patch of sky as it’s an image that everyone is familar with and the emotional resonance is universal. (I also thought about using the window view of my childhood home. That experience would be uniquely evocative to me, but might not be as effective on other viewers.)
Your Sky Machine unleashes a physical window from the spatial scope and the temporal scope. A joystick is employed to move the sky window across the room and to travel forward and backward in time. It transforms your room into an immense space, residing in its own time.
In a similar way that Olafur Elliasson always makes the mechanism and the construction of the “man-made nature” transparent to the viewers, Your Sky Machine is not trying to act as a mysterious magic box or trick people into believing the “man-made sky” is real. The focus is on the pure senses, perceptions, and experiences.
