Secrets of Creation by Robin Mackay & Matthew Watkins

Author:Robin Mackay & Matthew Watkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913029890
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

Conrad Shawcross, The Celestial Meters: Venus . Image courtesy of the artist.

CS: I’ve just inherited a whole set of threading tools all in imperial threads, 1/364th and so on, I inherited it from this engineer, they just can’t possibly work in metric. Fractions are actually easier in that context, when you go below one it’s actually appreciably easier to use fractions rather than decimals.

Anyway, so The Celestial Meters are a series of nine stainless steel rods, at the end is a milled flat that has the name of one of the planets. The rods range from eighteen centimetres to nine and a half metres long. Earth is 98.7cm long, which is the correct metre.

MW: And they’re all a ten-millionth of a sector of that planet?

CS: But they’re all units of one in their own right. So it comes back to this idea of there being no such thing as one.

MW: The unit is arbitrary.

CS: But they’re all their own absolutes in a sense.

In the Science Museum this could very much be an intervention. Not presented as ‘this is an artwork’, but that you encounter something that appears to be authentic. And the real problem is where you draw that line: you draw people in, there is a sense of a suspension of disbelief, but you don’t actually want to con people into thinking this is a real historical artefact, so at some point you have to allow that to be a realisation, or at least to make sure that, if they bother to spend the time looking at it, they realise that it’s not.

MW: In what sense is it inauthentic?

CS: It’s not a real scientific object, it’s fake history. It was shown in the measurement gallery, and when you think of that story of the origin of the metre, the metre is such an everyday thing, you think it’s ubiquitous and has been around forever, whereas in fact its this precarious thing that doesn’t really mean anything, I find it quite a philosophically useful story to show how precarious and arbitrary the things of our everyday lives are. But it’s there as a philosophical springboard for people. So it’s useful to have it in the context of a museum, in a collection concerned with measurement.

MW: That’s probably the best example yet: you have a creation that, without having to be too explicit, allows people to grasp the arbitrary nature of units of measurement, which is actually quite difficult to ‘get’, people think these things are just built into the world. They might think about it, but this makes it inarguable, in a way—so you’ve done it…but it’s not a highly abstract idea, it doesn’t require experts to grasp it.

CS: But they’re also quite austere, these objects, so unless people are willing to hear the story, they’re like, what the hell is this, is it a drain rod or something?

MW: So people would wander into the room, and is there any information?

CS: Yes there is, there was a press release and things and if they choose to, the viewer can engage with that.

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