Access a slow-looking exercise related to these works.

Transcript
In "River of Images" by Sarah Sze, made in 2023, the Guggenheim’s light gray exterior walls are transformed into a metaphorical screen that receives a stream of projected videos onto its concrete surface.

From the exterior, the iconic Guggenheim rotunda appears to be made of four stacked rings, each one larger than the one beneath it, sitting atop an oblong base. In River of Images, each projection moves across the street level of the building’s exterior surface about 8 feet above the sidewalk. The projections move at variable speeds, each seeming to follow the beat of its own drum, which sometimes leads two projections to overlap in their travels. Faint and hard to read by daylight, the projections grow in intensity and clarity as the sun sets and the sky darkens.

Each glowing projection is a rounded-rectangle-shaped vignette of a video in a loop. There are perhaps a hundred videos, and each has a different motif, including calm water, active hands interacting with small objects, and flames burning as small as an ignited match and as large as an erupting volcano. In the artist’s words, the fragments of these familiar motifs represent “the debris of images that we encounter daily in today’s digitally and materially saturated world,” like those we scroll through in our phones and personal device screens.

The projections move in an uneven line across the subtle curves of the exterior walls from the north end to the south, and disappear into the building’s glass windows and doors. Though not visible from the exterior of the building, the "River of Images" continues in the interior of the building along the top level of the rotunda, where it caresses every surface of the walls of the circular space.

Above the "River of Images" on the ground level is another projection on the exterior of the building: a glimmering orb of light. This work is titled, "Wider Than the Sky," made in 2023. The orb, an image of the moon, sits on the top circle of the rotunda. After dark, the projection of the moon mimics the phases of the actual moon in the sky, waxing and waning in real time, perhaps prompting thought about timelines of nature and timelines of the digital world. In the artists words, the work is “an experiment in collective timekeeping that all in the city can experience.”

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