Lighting The Same Fire

The Khazars, a multiconfessional kingdom related to the artist’s ancestry are invoked in the work as exemplary of both the biggest and most influential Jewish polity in history, as well as its multi-ethnic and multi-religious tolerance, without parallel in history.

The Khazars originated in nomadic tribes worshipping the titular sky god Tengri. Without a clear center or a major city found to date, their structures of culture and politics traversed the Eurasian steppe in alternative, unknowable, and un-sense-able ways.

Lighting The Same Fire is a device for gleaning meaning from the same energy they worshipped and harnessed. An artist-made solar panel shaped as a Khazar sun pendant collects electromagnetic energy through the photovoltaic response of Copper Dioxide.

Through the Electromagnetic Memory Effect, that energy might carry something of the lost Khazar knowledge. Using custom made display elements and a generative algorithm, myth and measurements mix into a speculative refiguration of Khazar aesthetics, a sun spot, a fire.

A technology of hope, the device is meant to embody Khazar techniques, images, and practice, to reclaim the culture’s place in the history of the Jewish people, and to learn how to restore the inter-religious tolerance practiced throughout the kingdom.