All Your Last Week's Desires by Tobias Rehberger

German artist Tobias Rehberger created an installation that projects light from exactly a week prior to the time in which it is being viewed (using a sensor gleaning light patterns from outside the gallery). The artwork is constituted by about a dozen strands of small, flat, stacked glass-like panels all dangling from a single wooden rafter. Each individual piece of each strand is part of the overall replication of light from the past.

This piece relates to time-based media by using the measure of time as one of its dimensions. It is four-dimensional. Its record of the lighting outside from exactly a week prior is the one varying factor of the overall piece. This phenomenon is a small-scale model of a much larger reality, which is in the way we see stars. The relationship between time and distance within our solar system is what creates a delay in the light reflected from stars that are lightyears away. Rehberger manipulates natural processes in this piece to emulate natural processes that are seen every night, without manipulation, from the human perspective.

My first impression of the piece felt very ethereal. Because this work compresses a natural process that occurs over many human lifetimes, it shows that in an infinite universe, patterns can never exist fully. There is repetition, there is change (both of which are, generally, the only two ways we measure time), and there is a convergence of both when an infinite universe is considered. This is something we are often unable to see given our short lifetimes. The idea of infinity is always something I have really connected with, so I found this piece very intriguing.