Turrell's work at the ICA

I went in to the ICA with the intention of looking at this piece to get the asignment over with and walked into the room it was in and my first impression was "what's the big deal?" It seemed like it was just a red block of light being projected on the wall but then I noticed something, I noticed how people were putting their hands up and it seemed as if they were pushing right into the wall, it was one of the strangest things I ever saw. I went up closer to the piece and got lost in it, it looked as if it was an infinite tunnel of light and it had me perplexed. I noticed a lot of the people coming up to it were immidiately trying to see how it was done and it was irritating me a bit. If they would stop trying to look at how it was done and would just look into the light then they would get a lot more out of it. It's good sometimes to suspend yourself in disbelief.

response to camera obscura

I thought it was very interesting to see. In my high school photo class we had to make pinhole cameras but it was not as large of a scale as this. At first it was difficult to see what was going on, my eyes took a very long time to adjust to the low level of light as well as trying to focus on the image that is being projected. I don't think I was able to see the image clearly on the wall but we decided to put up the card again and we were able to see it clearly. I forgot for a moment that the image through the pinhole is shown upside down which was disorienting at first, but once I realized the image was flipped I was able to see clearly that what I was looking at was the courtyard.

ancient model of keeping time

the method of ancient time keeping I researched was water clocks.


Water clocks were among the first methods of keeping track of time that did not depend on observations of celestial bodies. One of the oldest water clocks was found in the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep's tomb. He was buried around 1500 BCE. The water clocks were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. Other water clocks were cylindrical, or bowl-shaped containers designed to slowly fill with water coming in at a constant rate. Markings on the inside surfaces measured the passage of "hours" as the water level reached them. These clocks were used to determine hours at night, but may have been used in daylight as well. Another version consisted of a metal bowl with a hole in the bottom; when placed in a container of water the bowl would fill and sink in a certain time. These were still in use in North Africa in the 20th century.

response to Turrell's work

I thought it was fascinating. Although I wasn't quite clear on what exactly he did with light. I think the flaw is in the video made about him and his work because it didn't quite explain what he was doing it was more about him and his fascination with light. I wasn't sure if he was filming the sun's path or something like that. I did think the very first project of his was interesting, the one that was like a light tunnel at the MFA in Houston, it was intersting seeing people react to the light when it changed colors.