5.3 seconds West
London
2017 - 2018
21x21cm hardcover book, 203 pages
"Value
1. The importance or worth of something
for someone.
2. How useful or important something
is.
Worth
1. Having a particular value, especially in money.
2. To be important or interesting enough to receive
a particular action.
3. Enjoyable enough or producing enough
advantages to make the necessary effort, risk, pain,
etc. seem acceptable.
Desirable
1.Worth having and wanted by
most people.
2. Sexually attractive.
Unfit
1. Not suitable or good enough for a particular purpose or activity.
2. Lacking the qualities needed or expected for something; not suitable."
- The Cambridge Dictionary
The reason this book exists is that
nothing needs any reason to exist at all,
because everything is worth it all
and nothing is ever worth
a thing.
It contains 91 drawings of 91 abandoned objects seen on the streets of London, over the course of 2017 and 2018.
It is a sample from a gallery of 684 (growing) recorded objects to date, from fifteen out of thirty-two
boroughs.
Five of these boroughs are recorded here
in the form of their discarded objects.
Data was put together for each specific item,
consisting of
- precise location when recorded (including geographical coordinates)
- size
- material composition
- description of their nature and utility from the human perspective.
You can question everything you see and read.
The holes and the dog shit stains.
The rust on the saw's teeth.
The street names.
The use of a toilet seat.
You can wonder, wander and defy your subjectivity and its origins. And defy mine. You can also
close this book by which action you will cease to commodify it like those items once were.
- introduction of 5.3 Seconds West, p.13
On the title
"5.3 Seconds West" refers to the prime meridian located in Greenwich, London. A prime meridian is a location at which the longitude is exactly 0 degrees. This is what Greenwich and its astronomic observatory are famous for.
However with the development of satellite tracking (/GPS), it was found out that the spot at which Greenwich's longitude 0 was established is not accurately at a zero se
"Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers show that the marking strip for the prime meridian at Greenwich is not exactly at zero degrees, zero seconds and zero minutes longitude. It is astronomically, but not geodetically, which is the measurement satellites use because it takes the differences in mass of the atmosphere into account.
Thus, longitude zero is actually "5.3 seconds of arc to the west of the meridian (meaning that the meridian appears to be 102.478 metres east)".
This book is an exploration, a mapping of the urban landscape through its discarded commodities. The title is a reference to this exploration, and a suggestion that just like the worth and value of these items as source of interest and/or thorough research and/or enjoyment, the worth and value of things one is certain of knowing is to be treated with great caution, for imperfection is everywhere. Whether it should be embraced or not is fully up to the knower, and up to the reader/viewer, like all manners of things.
