OUROBORE

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble & granite - plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock.

ROBERT SMITHSON

At the setting the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. A dense bank of cloud became visible to the northward; it had a sinister dark olive tint, and lay lower and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid obstacle in the path of the ship. She went foundering towards it like an exhausted creature driven to its death... The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry night of the earth - the starless night of the immensities beyond the created universe revealed in its appalling stillness through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel.

JOE CONRAD

Our vision is...determined by our weight and oriented by the pull of earth’s gravity, by the classic distinction between zenith and nadir - the original reference point for sight, one bound up with the delicate balancing act of a universal attraction which imposes on us its gearing towards the centre of the Earth, at the risk of our falling.

PAUL VIRILIO

The rope doesn't hang, the earth pulls.

VICTOR HUGO