These two iPhones are all there is to “The Distance of a Day”, an installation by the young Brooklyner David Horvitz that I just saw at the Art Basel fair, in the booth of Berlin’s Chert gallery. Last February, Horvitz got his mom to record a video of the sunset over the sea near Los Angeles, where he was born and grew up. At the same moment that she was taping, he was at a point almost opposite her on the globe, in the Maldives, taping the same sun as it rose. There was something poignant for me in imagining our great sun as a tenuous link between mother and son. There was also a kind of almost scientific rigor in the piece, as it demonstrated a basic truth of astronomy. And, of course, it was also about virtuality: A deeply physical project that involves two people and the places they’re in comes to us care of an ephemeral digital record – in fact presented on the very phones that recorded the scenes.
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