Blinn and Lambert
Day without time
Sept 12 - Nov 3

Text by Gaby Collins-Fernández

Blinn and Lambert give us Day without time: as a gift, it is a speculative, propositional one. We can only have it if we suspend our disbelief, which is not quite the same as believing. For example, I don’t exactly believe that Blinn and Lambert are the authors of this work, since Nicholas Steindorf and Kyle Williams don’t really hide their identities; but I will suspend my disbelief so that Nick and Kyle can show me something that requires them to disappear in plain sight. “Blinn” and “Lambert” are both 3D modeling effects, the former for rendering shiny volumes and the latter, matte; the human duo collaborating both nominally and literally on processes of simulation that become obscured by the intended effect. 

Day without time has this impact: an immediate delight at seeing light somehow become a colorful glyph, both a shape and a line; and an almost-as-immediate curiosity about what we are looking at and how it came to be. Blinn and Lambert are as enthusiastic in describing the process as they are to say that it doesn’t really matter to know it, that it should sit behind the experience of being there. The experience is ideally slow and quiet, emptied of everything except light and the breathy efforts of the projector as it streams the image forward.

Stare at light which is somehow a shape for as long as it takes an electron from the sun to ride its wave to Earth. That light moves through a window, through the canvas; electrically powered light meets it on that surface, filtered through a slide. Of course, the sun and earth are moving too. The image made on the slide was made by a column of colored lights which did not move; the camera moved instead in a prescribed shape between its own extended blinks. The shape you see is actually the time of its own movement, line linked to a gesture without a touch. Blinn and Lambert have rules for the shapes: neither too zany nor too dull, providing enough visual interest to hold us in place, but not so much that you get caught up in the meaning of the form. 

Instead, get caught up in how the shapes recede slightly in space, how the illusion is punctured by the daylight dimming behind it. Blinn and Lambert independently brought up the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey as an important reference for them. Made with similar slit-screen imaging, the gorgeous color-warp of Stargate is a stand in for warp-speed, the sense that time is catapulting us beyond our own lives. Day without time asks for a little relief, allowing us to pretend for each eight-minute and twenty-second interval that we are not running out our own clocks. The banality of each form does not make it less beautiful; it is like being surprised by the sweetness of summer’s last tomatoes, or still being in love with your partner after ten years, or longing for a moment to get to know yourself again after a week of over-scheduling. The camera moves over its forms the way your eye might move over something you don’t want to forget, making memories into maps that we can revisit as material once their time has drifted away. 

What we get when we agree to believe is the emotional record of where we have been, the ability to defer time onto space, even if only for a minute. Then, with a jolt, the slide changes, and throws time back in the air. The sun emits new light, and the countdown begins again.