New work made for New Climates
In Sunrise the scene is set with a dubious, yet beautiful, night time shot of the cityscape of Nicosia, Cyprus. The lights of the city can be seen glimmering in the horizon whilst the foreground is lit using green and red artificial lighting. Gradually, as daylight begins to set in, the city lights suddenly turn off, marking the beginning of a new day. As the sun begins to rise, a second layer gradually reveals itself with an opposing setting sun in reverse-time. The grid-like presentation of the two layers fragments the scene creating a disturbing, yet alluring sight in which the rays of the sun seem to reflect off one another.
Accompanying the visuals is a broadcast on the national radio station of Cyprus. The topics addressed by the spokeswoman include a commentary on the development and use of technology by mankind, its negative side effects and moral issues. She concludes that positive technological progress can only be achieved with a clean and conscious heart. A love song follows with the image of the sun being used metaphorically to symbolise love. The overjoyed tone of the song is then robbed of its cheerfulness by an explicit news story on the dangers and risks of global warming which ends with the statistic that the year 2006 was the sixth hottest in recorded history. As the two suns merge into one, perhaps referencing the Platonic imagery of the sun as “ultimate truth,” religious church singing closes out the scene. Is this a prayer for a future of hope and change, or mourning for a world that is already dead?
– Peter Eramian
Sunrise by Peter Eramian presents a seemingly natural vista and poses the question of its artificiality. Focusing on the sun, a focal point in the climate change debate, Eramian merges two video layers in an alternating grid—one depicting the sun rising in real time, the other with it setting at an accelerated rate—seeming to reference both our mediated experience of nature and our anxiety about the timeline of climate change. Sunrise emphasizes the global dimension of the climate change crisis and the technologies through which it is filtered. The audio track consists of a radio broadcast (including a report on climate change) and ambient sounds from the artist’s native Cyprus. The image itself is segmented into a pixel grid that references the work’s digitization and dispersal across the globe.
