Night and Day

Night and Day gathers images from web cameras installed around the world continuously and arranges them in a circular sequence, allowing the boundary between day and night to drift slowly across the screen. Using live images captured by publicly accessible surveillance cameras and nature-observation cameras, the work quietly reveals planetary-scale temporal flow. Behind it lies a major technological shift: in the mid-1990s, only a handful of live cameras existed, but within a few years their numbers exploded. And just as the Cambridge University coffee-pot camera was accidentally shared with the world, the sudden ability to witness a distant “now” was a defining sensation of the early Internet. For this exhibition, a new set of currently available cameras has been collected, and Koichiro Eto’s original implementation has been updated and adapted. It now runs within an emulated environment capable of executing legacy Java applets.