Thursday, December 3, 2009

Still the Centre (10 July, 2009)



In the paved area around and in front of the O2 Dome in London, there are a number of paving stones with text on them, some of which refer to the history of astronomy (one has the date that John Flamsteed established the meridian and GMT at Greenwich). Others seem random, such as one with the date "1924" and the words "pip, pip, pip..." underneath. The stones follow the line of the Greenwich Meridian, from which time is measured forward and backward around the globe and from which longitude can be determined.

I took several pictures of different texts on the ground before finding this one. In this picture a portion of the text is visible clearly within the boundaries of the shadow, my figure, on the ground--cast by midday sun (it was almost 1pm GMT, the moment when the Time Ball at Greenwich would drop). To me the Eurocentrism of the claim is interesting as an underlying theme of the picture, because there is also the suggestion of the body or the subject--to get theoretical--as the "centre of space and time" as well, or even of the "human" as the centre of the natural world.

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