Constant

Since 2018, artists Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner have worked collaboratively to produce videos and installations that investigates the body and its surroundings, study knowledge regimes and power, and apprehend modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. Constant explores social and political histories of measurement. The film deals with three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialization of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Much like maps, measurement systems produce abstract models of the world. By substituting qualitative experience with quantitative data, they propose and reinforce the ideological promise of accurately capturing the real, only by neutralizing other modes of knowing and being in the world. The film engages with measurement systems at their edges, where their logic falters and turns into something at once absurd, violent, tragic, and comic. Using a variety of image making tools, from photo­grammetry to 360 degree cameras, live action footage, and diagrams, the film shows that images themselves are measurement systems, while simultaneously revealing the ubiquitous presence of experience beyond measurement. For the exhibition at SMB12, the artists explore themes from the film in a new multimedia installation composed of three main features. On entering, viewers encounter 4 LED light bars that divide the space, with the two in the middle marking the standard meter. Facing the light beams is a reproduction of a comic Little Sammy Sneeze by illustrator and animator Winsor McCay from 1905. A large vinyl cutout crosses the entire floor, referencing one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, an ancient thought experiment on the infinite subdivision of a distance by halves.