Inflatable plastic globes, wood, glass, books
Variable size (one globe with stand 120x90cm)
1997
Collection of Vantaa Art Museum
Heresy is a kind of environmental art work, which plays with some concepts used for perceiving and analysing space.
The work consists of two inflatable plastic globes, one of which is “upside down”. They are mounted on 18th-century-style stands. There are two “old” books, one connected to each globe. The inside-out globe is connected to a book with a text “proving” the theory of the hollow world to be true, and comparing it with the “normal” theory. The book on the “normal” globe “proves” the traditional theory to be true and compares it with the hollow world theory.
Everything that we know about the universe is based on observation and measurement of electromagnetic radiation, and one presumption or axiom is that light (i.e. electromagnetic radiation) travels in a straight line, or rectilinearly(*), in a vacuum.
“Heresy” is meant to play - but not to prove - with an idea: what would happen if this basic assumption were to be excluded? It has certainly been proved that light always follows the shortest possible route when it travels from point A to point B, but is this route necessarily straight. What if we suddenly had the knowledge that as a general rule the curvature of space differs considerably from zero (i.e. that light did not travel straight)? Visual perception would of course remain unchanged, but the model of the universe would look totally different.
Some “scientists” living in the 19th and 20th centuries, like Cyrus Reed Teed and Karl Neupert, thought that the earth is a hollow ball (of the same size as we today know the planet to be, but turned inside out so that we live inside it, and the Sun, moon, stars and space are inside the globe). Undeniably a wild idea, but with certain presumptions it(**) can be “verified” without any changes in our visual experience.