Digital Rituals by Giant Swan
Rituals
The first Ritual. A sculpture in the dark. You light it. Together you decide what it becomes.
Move to bring light
Digital Rituals by Giant Swan
The first Ritual. A sculpture in the dark. You light it. Together you decide what it becomes.
Move to bring light
The first Ritual begins in
A wax sculpture waits in a dark room. It exists only because people light it.
In the first Ritual, each person who takes part lights a candle and sends it into the scene. It lands on the sculpture and burns with a flame shaped by their own wallet. Nobody holds a controller. One scene, rendered live, and what happens to it over three days is decided by everyone who lights it.
Candles heat the wax. Heat melts it. Too much burns it. There is something inside, and the only way to see it is to melt what is in front of it.
Every flame is a person. The sculpture does nothing on its own.
The sculpture begins unlit. It stays dark until the first candle.
You light a candle, from the room in Marfa or from anywhere. Its flicker, brightness and colour come from your wallet. No two are the same.
A candle burns twelve Ritual hours. Tend your flame. Relight it at any time, free.
After seventy-two hours the Ritual closes. The sculpture is whatever everyone left of it. There is no reset and no second run.
Seventy-two hours. One flame each, or more. What is left is up to all of you.
Light as many candles as you like. They all belong to the same token, which stays with you after the close.
Come to Marfa and stand with the sculpture. Or be a part of the Ritual from wherever you are. What matters is not where you stand but what you do with your flame.
Tend your flame. Tend your light. Every candle matters, and every action here has a reaction.
Why your hand matters
Nobody operates the sculpture. It is not lit on a schedule and it is not tended by Giant Swan. If no one lights a candle, nothing happens. If everyone lights one and walks away, the wax melts where the flames are and the night cools it again.
Your candle remembers everything you do with it. Whether you kept it alight, blew it out, let it go, came back. How it ends is decided by everyone. What you become is decided by you.
The first Ritual opens at Plastic Cactus, Marfa, Texas. From the first candle the scene runs without stopping. There is no scheduled moment and no one at the controls.
Day and night. The sculpture keeps Marfa time. Through the Marfa night, roughly eleven until seven, the wax cools and the candles burn slow.
At the end of the seventy-second hour the Ritual is over. The sculpture is what was left of it. Nothing is reset, nothing is run again.
Inside the Ritual, time is counted in Ritual hours, not by the clock on your wall.
What will we emerge as? How do we see ourselves?
Two works that can be placed in the sculpture.
The first Ritual takes place in Marfa, Texas, as part of Plastic Cactus, a group exhibition for Art Blocks Marfa Weekend.
0.01 ETH a candle. Ethereum mainnet. From Marfa, or from wherever you are.
