Pitch Drop, 2016

The oldest ongoing experiment in the history of science began in 1930, in a laboratory in Queensland, Australia. Conceived by the physicist Thomas Parnell, the Pitch Drop experiment was initiated to demonstrate the fluid dynamics of pitch—a highly viscous fluid derived from petroleum. Though it would appear solid and rocklike to everyday observation, over the course of years it behaves as a fluid. Appropriating the technical format of this slow-motion theater, Julian Charrière’s performative sculpture changes and expectantly drips only once every decade. Echoing the principle of the clepsydra, an ancient water clock, but replacing water with pitch, Pitch Drop recalls how fluids were essential to the earliest human attempts to measure time—where the steady flow of water laid the founda­tions for time-reading itself.

With a total of 1,000 individual drops, this piece is designed to span a symbolic 10,000-year time frame, a temporal scale that reaches beyond the horizon of human memory and history. As a time-based artwork that plays out at the rate of centuries, it is also allegorical of the deep sea, as a shifting threshold where the solid and liquid blur—a realm of molten rock cooling into new crust, minerals crystallizing in the heat of hydro­thermal vents, and ancient organic matter transforming into petroleum, seeping through fractures in the seabed. Static yet phantasmagorical, it gestures to geological time frames beyond the human lifespan.