Midday/Midnight (66° 33')

Installation comprising two screen video filmed in the arctic circle, which shows the same car journey across a steel bridge at midnight and midday on the longest and shortest days of the year. Originally shown in Finland as Picturesque Journey. Midday/Midnight (66° 33’) is a video installation exploring space and time. It was filmed on the arctic circle in the far north of Finland at the site of the last Enlightenment expedition, led by the French scientist Maupertuis to determine the shape of the earth and finalise the big cartographic project. Orlow’s video loop shows the same car journey across a steel bridge at midnight and midday on the longest and shortest days of the year. The presence of light in one image and its absence in the other confuses the difference between day and night, dissolving the linear division of days into hours, and hours into minutes, in favour of subjective and aesthetic experience of time as an eternal, cyclical transformation. The decision to film the 1-minute journey across the bridge on both summer and winter solstice aimed to foreground the relationship between natural, cyclical, historical and experiential models of time. An interim screening of the project as a site-specific installation at the Aine Art Museum ,Tornio, Finland (2004), resulted in sponsorship from Outokumpu, one of the world’s largest steel companies, which allowed further development of the project. In its final form the work brought together an exploration of arctic tourism, the history of geodesy (the measurement of the earth) and the contrast between qualitative and quantitative notions of time, exploring the interface between industrial realities of contemporary travel and ideas about nature and time. The final work was exhibited in ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ (ICA and South London gallery, 2006) alongside international artists including Mona Hatoum, Yinka Shonibare and Marc Camille Chaimowicz and was singled out in a critical review in Art Monthly for its successful engagement with the poetics of travel