The Raft of the Medusa

The Raft of the Medusa consists of a series of oil on canvases. Each canvas in the series, a selection of seascapes by mainly nineteenth-century artists, reproduces only the horizon line from the original painting. The line of the horizon is doubled, however. Two parallel lines, separated by a barely noticeable distance—below one milimeter—refer to the impact that a 3-degree planetary temperature rise will have on the ocean level horizon.

Displaying the same interruptions of the horizon line in the original painting, the doubled horizon brought to the foreground becomes a kind of data register of the bodies in the pictured scene. This function of the horizon as an autograph is presented together with its doubling: while the historicity of the height of the ocean horizon in relation to climate change turns potentially every seascape of the past into a measure of historical sea level data, this transformation assumes images to be data-images as well. The scale of planetary time meets human visual histories through the datification of the image.