The Third Way: Double Sun Vision

“The Third Way: Double Sun Vision” is indebted to Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall’s concept of two-eyed seeing which recognizes the power of indigenous ways of practice-based knowing combined and in harmony with Western scientific-rational epistemology. It proposes a machine for the production of epistemological and cognitive justice in which all epistemologies and ways of knowing are sacred and together create new answers for planetary justice. In my utopian and protopian vision, neither epistemology dominates but they act harmoniously and fluidly together. All epistemologies are enlightened and assembled together to create a productive sustainable planetary epistemology ready to meet the challenges of our planet at the edge of disaster. My work presents an integrated machine in which both ancestral practical understanding and rational-scientific knowledge are entangled to produce solutions to our immense problems.

This work is an eco-sustainable earth work composed of a centrally-located cement stele, meant to represent a facsimile of a Mayan sundial, surrounded by LED light tubes arranged in concentric circles, demonstrating the Copernican heliocentric concept of the planetary motion around the sun’s axis. At the far periphery is an encircling band of solar panels that captures sunlight and stores it in subterranean batteries. The artwork is a machinic assemblage of ancestral and enlightened knowledges concerning time and astronomy that work together, powered by the sun and its motions. At daybreak, the sundial becomes active, indicating the time of day as a long undulating, serpentine shadow that stretches from the center to the periphery. At dusk, the batteries are activated to release their energy to power LED concentric neon tubing to create a wonderful light show in the desert. This repeats itself every day, changing its appearance and dynamic temporality according to the time of year. The top image is its mode of operation in the day and the bottom image its illumination at night.