ONE DAY IN HEAVEN

In 2015, I photographed the tourist hustle and bustle at the navel of the world, the Heaven’s Heart Stone, the central point of the Altar of Heaven in Beijing. Surprised by the incessantly celebrated poses and the seemingly religious gestures of the streams of visitors, I spent several days there from morning to evening and created a series of many hundreds of images. For centuries, the Chinese emperor offered the great sacrifice once a year on this altar, which had to maintain the order of the world, the harmony between heaven and earth, with its precise execution.

What, the texts in the book ask, are we to make of the practices carried out there today by millions of people? Is there a new, albeit informal, great sacrifice? What is the nature of heaven today, and what sacrifice does an assumed new heaven accept in our day? Is this new heaven nourished and built up by a swelling mass of offerings of images and data?

From this perspective, the entire world of digitization machines and their adepts, the digitizers, appears as an altar site on which the old earth undergoes a transformation of essence. The Temple of Heaven is the place where the transition from the old to the new heaven becomes visible: It is defined as the symbolic icon of this global process. The mass procession of image-making for the digital image heaven becomes an image itself in this place.