The Distance of a Day

American artist David Horvitz is best known for making the internet a stage for his eccentric and interactive projects. One of his ongoing projects, I will think about you for one minute, lets viewers pay Horvitz one dollar on his website or at a gallery to get him to think about them for one minute, with the artist diligently emailing the subject at the beginning and end of that minute.

The Distance of a Day (2013) is composed of two phones, placed side by side, playing video recordings of a sunset and a sunrise. The title of the installation is inspired by the word ‘journey’ which once referred to distances travelled in one day (from Middle English journee– “a day’s travel”). To create it, Horvitz in February 2013 asked his mother to watch and film a sunset near her California home. As she recorded the sun’s descent over America’s West coast, Horvitz was standing on the coast of The Maldives, capturing a simultaneous sunrise halfway around the world.

The juxtaposition of these two moments, when two individuals were separated by a day yet brought together by the intimacy of a shared gaze, forms Horvitz’s installation, played on the devices in which they were captured. The videos act as windows to similar moments unfolding in the present at different points on our rotating planet. Somewhere right now, the sun is setting and rising simultaneously. And two people separated by the intervening day are unwittingly sharing that moment.