Common Accounts presents Have a Nice Day in the exhibition Soleil-s, curated by Scott Longfellow and Rafael Santianez, as part of Solar Biennale 2 at Musée de Design et d’Arts Appliqués, MUDAC, in Lausanne.
Have a Nice Day is a solar canopy: an interior sun apparatus suspended in the museum. Animated by motion sensors, it constitutes an artificial sun, inviting visitors to bathe under its warmth, sound, and light frequencies. The installation considers the sun as a cosmic battery whose rays can increasingly be replicated and directed toward myriad purposes. Theorized among them: cellular rehabilitation, anti-aging, and enhanced fertility. As such, Have a Nice Day examines perceptions of the sun in relation to optimization, self-design, planetarity, technology, and daily life.
The project troubles the psycho-social associations with the sun in the age of climate anxiety and channels them into sensible, energetic encounters in the space of the gallery. Suspended from Have a Nice Day is an arsenal of off-the-shelf devices that reproduce energetic performances of the sun. Among them: red lights, UV tanning lights, tube lights set to daylight colour temperatures, space heaters, speakers playing solar sonifications, and screens featuring moments of contact between body and sun.
The installation is informed by the sun’s simultaneous instrumentality as life source and hazard from the early 20th century (as articulated by the philosophies of Cosmism and Georges Bataille), to the present day.
Have a Nice Day has been acquired for MUDAC’s permanent collection and was made possible with support from the Embassy of Spain in Switzerland, and the Embassy of Canada in Switzerland.
The installation was fabricated in Portugal by ArtWorks. Research for Have a Nice Day was completed by Marie-Ellen Houde-Hostland, Emilie Tamtik, and Elizaveta Grishina. The piece features videos edited by Andrew Gilbride, and presents a sonification of the sun produced by Dr. Alexander Kosovichev at NJIT using data collected by the Solar Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA.
