Barbara Seiler

Dear Visitor,

Anna is my dearest friend. She is a chef. She has fed me in multiple ways for over a decade now. Anna is also a formidable actress who has been in several of my videos, including What the Heart Wants which I completed last week. It’s about the future of what it could mean to be human and who gets to be a person.
When Barbara invited me to do something here in June, we knew it would be at the end of a long period of production for both of us. She asked what I would want to do. I mentioned I’d probably want to eat, see my friends, and attempt to digest some of the information gathered while making What the Heart Wants. I wanted to do something collaborative. I thought of Anna.

Anna and I were chatting on Skype about things we were reading and thinking about. I mentioned Breugel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (about the Greek myth of Icarus) as a point of reference for What the Heart Wants. Icarus wanted to get out of Crete so his father made him some wings out of feathers and wax. He warned not to get too close to the sea, nor too close to the sun- as compelling as that might be. His father talked to him about hubris but overall was pretty positive: “They may have conquered the land and sea but not the regions of the air.”

Anna reminded me that people still think internet lives in the clouds and point to the sky when talking about Wi-Fi.

We watched a video that used Icarus’ tale of hubris as an analogy for the tech industry’s desire to merge with all aspects (and push the limits) of humanity. Icarus ended up flying too close to the sun, which melted the wax and sent him crashing to his death into the sea. We agreed that we’re living in time when it’s not clear how close we are to the land or sea. We could either learn to harness the power of the sun (and enter a much talked about new era as humans) or crash into the sea (and die out). The conversation became kind of a bummer and we were all ‘so busy’- that part is kind of boring so…

A dinner was held on June 11th, 2016 to inaugurate Barbara Seiler Galerie’s new space. The menu was created in response to this aspect of my research.

Sun adjacent: an egg for a millennium is an edition created by Anna and myself as a way to preserve our conversation using old and new technologies.

We are not in the sea, yet

We have not hit the sun, yet

But we are,

Sun adjacent

Sun adjacent: an egg for a millennium, 2016
SATA hard drive cases, tea, hay, soil, sodium carbonate, charcoal, wood ash, quail egg, plastic Edition of 13 (+2 AP)

Anna Rose Hopkins and Cécile B. Evans for Barbara Seiler Galerie

Special thanks to Markus Amsler, Angie Walti, Polina Chizhova, Hannes Zulauf, Sarah Bähler, Yan Guan Suter, Marcel van Eeden, Henry Fischer, Muhammet, and Karl Abegg Metzgerei & Delicatessen