Orbs

Overview

In the video Orbs, two people are playing with an armillary sphere, one of the oldest instruments of astronomy in the world invented separately by the ancient Greeks and the Chinese. It represents the objects in the sky, with the stars orbiting around the sun in the centre, while also setting measures for time. In European science, the geocentric view revolving around the stationary planet Earth was replaced with a solar one, the Copernican heliocentric model, in the 16th century. Earth appears here as part of a larger cosmic order of things, its fate connected to that of the other bodies in ceaseless motion. The detached eye of the rational mind is replaced in the video by two embodied subjects. Hesitant and exploratory, the hands appear in search of a shared rhythm rather than assuming the place of a universal man making the world go around.