Spacetime Grooving

This is no ordinary disco ball. Once illuminated in a dark room, Totality (2016) by Katie Paterson projects images of 10,000 solar eclipses documented throughout history. And those are just ones that humans have spotted — what of the eclipses witnessed by primates, dinosaurs, or early marine plants whose photoreceptors beheld the dimming sky through the briny slosh of prehistoric seas? 

In another work titled 100 Billion Suns (2011), Katie Paterson represents in a volley of colorful confetti the 3,216 gamma-ray bursts so far recorded in space, each emitting a luminosity equal to 100 billion suns. 

Paterson’s work demonstrates the capacity of play to facilitate personal relationships with the cosmic. Through groovy shiny things and bright colors, she suggests, we can disarm the terror of vast timescales and endow transience with its own beauty. Like all play that starts and inevitably ceases, the disco ball will stop spinning at the end of the night and confetti will fade underfoot nearly as soon as it explodes. Even grandiose events like eclipses and gamma-ray bursts are, when reduced to bare fundamentals, a simple play of light and dark. 

— Haena Chu