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Ice Pendulum

The ice pendulum is a live event and sculpture that recreates Léon Foucault's famous 1851 Panthéon pendulum demonstration with a bob of melting ice. While constituting over half the earth's body of water in frozen form, ice is in a constant state of change. It is a material that is always on the verge of being in one form or another, and in recent years melting polar ice has become a profound part of an increasing global consciousness of fragility.

This performance piece refers to the effects of shifting dispersions of water on the earth's axial precession, which are slowing of the speed of the planet's rotation, to make each day fractionally longer. When the ice starts to melt, the object loses its form, shifting our perception of planetary motion, similar to 1851, when Foucault astounded Parisians with his demonstration of the gravitational rotation of the earth, which simultaneously swung the French public to seal Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's grasp to power.



Future Revolutions
The pendulum still has more secrets to share today. As it flows through space, swinging back and forth, the pendulum seems to progress through a path, moving around in a loop like the world on its axis, in a flow which some philosophers have called the 'course of time'. Four centuries ago Galileo Galilei explained the reasons why we do not feel the earth's motion, saying it was due to the law of inertia: without any resistance we will continue in a given trajectory, so our experience of the pull of gravity is similar to its pull on the earth. Like a girl on the swing spinning within the world, we are dizzied by the sensation. But this is another illusion. The pendulum's place on its course is always the same, and we are the ones that turn around the demonstration.

The other radical evidence of temporal phenomena, the 'arrow of time' is also still at play in this enchanting object. In the melting pendulum of ice we confront constant material change. This 'decreating' substance is in stark contrast to the illusion of the apparently impermeable brass bob. Normally an unchanging solid, the frozen ball is now an obvious subject of the laws of thermodynamics, which decree that changes of matter are keyed into a cause-driven direction: for ice once melted can never return to how it was. To speak of decreation is to describe how loss feeds into another form and thus, in this generative role provides the probability of the future because of the arrowed quality of change.

The third aspect of time that we confront in the ice pendulum is its representation of global melting polar masses. Researchers are indicating that the shifting dispersion of water due to climate change is causing an exponential drag due to the gravitational pull of the moon on the tides that is slowing the precession of the earth on its axis and thus the velocity of the earth's rotation, adding to the length of each solar day, beyond the earth's current slowing rate of rotation of about 2.3 milliseconds per day per calendar year.

It is not easy to get ourselves out of the time to which we are accustomed. Much of the measures in use today remainl abstract. We are still embedded in a convenient fiction, unable to distinguish the method of counting moments instead of seeing how we pass through them. How can we revolutionise this way of perceiving ourselves in time?

Birth of the pendulum
The pendulum was of the most important instruments of time measurement in the 18th and 19th century and is at the foundation of the origins of western time measurement. Around 1602, Galileo Galilei found that the pendulum apparently possessed a consistent regulation of the periods in its swing regardless of the cable length, as the story goes, using his own pulse to measure the intervals.

In 1673, Christiaan Huygens invented a practicable means of making a pendulum control the speed with which a clock mechanism runs, and also for the seconds pendulum, which served as one of the primary devices for measuring the meridian, which ultimately became the length by which the standard metre was calculated a. The mètre étalon is no longer the standard measure but its origins are elemental to the limited time concept we continue to imagine today. At the dawn of the first French revolution, a momentous societal transformation was realised in the second reformation of all forms of measure based on the metric system, including the decimal day and 10-hour clock, one of which was for some time installed at the Tulieries Palace in the 19th century. Imagine if midday became 10 in the morning… In the end, the French meridian was calculated in a series of attempts at precision from 1790, and by 22nd July I799, 'the definitive standards of the metric system, the platinum metre and the platinum kilogram, were ceremonially deposited in the French National Archives.'

The mystical history of the metric system is written on that ruler. For, on the brass rod is stamped the figure of a woman (another sign of reproduction), next to the mark of the quadrant. All that is missing is the Freemason's acronym… "By letters four and science five, this "G" aright doth stand, in due Art and Proportion; you have your answer, friend." The G, meaning Geometry, is the first sign of the reign of the square, which persists to this day, ruling over relative or geodesic measures.