#11

This set of instructions may be best understood as a procedure for a hypothetical film, or as notes towards a comprehensive guide to daylight, less a script or a rule set than a group of loose guidelines to be followed and interpreted based on the understanding of the participants.

Procedure as Suggested

Each minute of the day, from 00:00 to 23:59, will be assigned to one correspondent. Each of these correspondents will operate within these simple guidelines -- each must have access to a video camera or equivalent recording device; each must be able to make a recording that documents that time to which they are assigned at those times in which visible daylight happens to occur. The specific mode of photographic representation, the specifics of implementing the recording, will be left to the judgment of the correspondents themselves. The completed footage will be sent daily to a centralized processing center, where it will be logged and archived over a period of one year. At this point it will be compiled, in order, each minute following one after another on separate screens.

Notes on Darkness

Due to the way that sunlight works, certain correspondents will be laboring through periods in which no visible sunlight is to be encountered at all. Depending of geography and the minutes assigned, it is not only conceivable but inevitable that certain correspondents will never encounter a single ray of sunlight through the entire course of the project. It is nonetheless highly advisable that, when the project has been completed and presented, that these gaps not be discounted, that they be given some kind of outlet nonetheless.

Presentation

While the most efficient form of presenting this work would no doubt be as some kind of new media piece -- through a devoted web site, for example -- we would personally advise against this; if nothing else, this is a project that is, in some fundamental way, opposed to efficiency in all its forms. While our opinion in this matter is hardly final, we cannot help but envision a genuine monument, like Rothko's Cathedral, in which each and every screen would play in unison, looping through the entire procedure again and again until the plug, somehow, is pulled.

Final Thoughts

Some eyebrows may well be raised, by the scope of the project, by the apparent futility of its aims. To this we would argue -- though not too fiercely -- that the monument resulting from our endeavor will be, in addition to being a guide to daylight, a monument to a certain kind of futility. Since there are so few of those in this world as it is.