Alan Franklin

Thinking About Relativity

"In my most recent work I have been using electric motors to create very slow, barely perceptible movement. The movement in these pieces does not entertain as in other kinetic work, but creates a world in which things exist in a different time frame, a time frame that is perhaps not so homo-centric.

"For FlyPitch I assembled 5 glass shelves running the length of the barrow. The five fish started in the morning at one end of the barrow and were hauled to the other by the evening. Their movement was like a migration, but it also made me think of the way materials and resources are moved from one place to another. We take rocks out of the ground here and build up a pile somewhere else; some times this seems absurd. Markets are all about the movement of materials.

"The fish are lined up as in a race but, absurdly, the race is so slow that you will never stay long enough to see who is the winner - there is a dislocation of time, as well as humour. Perhaps it refers to the miracle of the loaves and five fishes. The hyper-slow progress of the fish could be a metaphor for evolution. The pace of the event was in stark contrast to the hustle and bustle of the market.

"We stand on a revolving planet orbiting the sun, but the only empirical clues are the movement of the sun across the sky, a slowly changing canopy of stars and the cyclical pattern of the seasons. We are told that the stars are light years away and we are seeing things that no longer exist. Most of us are unable to conceive of these vast tracts of time, we accept the mathematics and physics that construct this cosmology, but it is just another story."

www.alanfranklin.net

Alan lubricates his fish