If we watch long enough

2022

If we watch long enough, 2022
Thermal images printed on window film.
Berg van barmhartigheid (Mount of piety), Ghent, Belgium.

Thermal image

A thermal camera was used to capture the thermal radiation emitted from the surface of the window on a sunny day in August 2022.

Multiple images of the entire glass surface were collected, one for each piece of glass, and then printed on a PVC sticker film. The printed films were pasted on the window, in such a way as each of them to match the exact measured area.

This translucent material allows the light from outside to color the hall's interior with shades that originate back to the thermal imaging of the particular summer day. The sunlight irritated the thermal camera at the moment of the measurement, and it remains the constant cause that triggers these colors from then on to tint the hall's interior, months later.

This intervention allows the influence of solar radiation on a day from the past, to mix with a current one. It can be considered that acts as feedback, as information gleaned from a previous state of the window affects how we observe it in the present.