REDSHIFT (2011)
site specific installation by Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, soundtrack by Sergei Komarov
Shown in the Column hall of the San Sebastiano Campus of the Ca’Foscari university.
The idea for the project “Redshift” arose after a talk with my father about the theory of the expansion of the universe, about the proof for this phenomenon that exists in the scientific community. My father told me about the red shift caused by the Doppler effect. It arises if the movement of the source of light relative to the observer causes an increase in the distance between them. This discovery formed the basis of our project.
We decided that this would be a site-specific project, with the main role given to sunlight. We only had to keep the viewers in the hall, so that they saw and felt the languid movement of the sun’s rays across the marble tiles, and with it, the movement of the entire earth around the sun. We wanted the viewer to stop, to be distracted from everyday life and simply become an observer.
At my request, my father calculated the angle of displacement of the sun over Venice during the exhibition. Entering the hall which had taken on the form of a camera obscura, viewers became the observer and the observed. They could feel the movement of the Earth around the Sun and synchronize themselves with it. We covered the windows with a red transparent film, and the red color became dominant. We made an allusion to the figurative discoveries of the Russian avant-garde, in particular the cosmic paintings of suprematism. This color gave an alien feeling to the hall, turning it into a space of abstract painting, geometry and color.
Elongated in form, the hall resembles a telescope. We set up three video projections of astronomical processes – the movement of the sun and the observation of heavenly bodies. At the end of the hall, we projected a video on to the hall, showing how the panels of the tower of the observatory pavilion open and close. The elongated blue rectangle of the sky contracts and expands. The sound of the panels set the rhythm and beat of the event – the hall breathed evenly. The video was taken in the main tower of the observatory in Pulkovo.
On the round screen that hovered in the air between the columns, a video observation of the sun in real time was projected. As a result of the theory of complementary colors, in red shift the circle of the sun turned green. The hall was constantly filled with sound. Specially for the project, we created a composition based on an audio file from ESA-NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory(SOHO) mission using Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) instrument. MDI recordings was used only as source for amplitude modulation of soundtrack played on analog synthesizer Korg MS-20.
Elena Gubanova