Drain sets up a system where sight (and the capacity for sighted navigation) is at the mercy of a translated sense of geologic time. It places the default human experience as one point on a spectrum between the ultra-macro (planetary or universal scale) to the ultra-micro (cellular, embryonic, or microbiotic).

Two heavy-duty plastic corrugated culverts lay intersected on the floor. One projects a loop of the sun setting into and rising back over the Illinois horizon in perpetuity - a full cycle lasts about 90 minutes. At the sun’s zenith, the projection provides enough light for the room to be legible, but at its nadir it’s harder to navigate. The dwindling light of the sunset is artificialized and cast onto the wall. Formally, it’s still a circle on the horizon, referencing the flattening of extreme distance and the reductive nature of images. Technically, the projector acts like the sun and the wall the moon, reflecting into the space with a fluctuating level like tides. A much softer circle is cast out of the other tube with the tell-tale flicker of a television set. For fans of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, the broader logic will sound familiar. The sunset tube projects outward and upward and gestures toward a macrocosmos while it controls the visual environment. In contrast, the tube with a microphone-probed navel looping on a monitor requires somatic compromise and an inward gaze, conjuring a microcosmos while controlling the sonic environment with the microphone’s sound transduced into felt physical vibrations in the corrugated tubes.