Historically, Governor’s Island provided a site to stage international events and military presence. Presently, it hosts domestic events in the public service. As an installation, Merry Times plays with the island’s mutable purpose, providing an idealized panoramic view from a patchwork of maritime imagery and sounds. Blending layers of decoupaged images and a glossing pattern, the projections pull from hyperlocal images, mathematical periodicity and the puzzled patternmaking of truchet tiling, alluding to the layered craft of composing history relative to place, where no snapshot view is ever identical to precedent. It applies photo, pattern, and parallax to a scene that swoons and swells with the passage of time, and invites the viewer to witness that pendulum progression around the island from a paradoxically static position.

Acknowledging the timelessness of an island with layered history, Merry Times invites viewers to immerse themselves in this sense of simultaneous position, presence, and parallax displacement.

Aurelia Moser is a librarian and developer based in New York and Nairobi. With a background in chemistry and codewriting, cataloging and art archiving, she makes work related to art history, data transparency, and information design. As a code-cartographer at Ushahidi and Internews-Kenya, and an advocate for global code curricula, she balances experience in design, dev and data-journo departments.

Currently an Interactive Developer in Bloomberg’s Visual Data team, Julian Burgess previously worked at the Guardian’s New York office; he has more than a decade of experience in media development, previously holding staff positions building web solutions for Reuters, The Times of London, and the Associated Press. An active participant in the JavaScript and Ruby programming community, Burgess was also a contributing founder of the city’s Hacks/Hackers chapter, and recently become a co-organizer of New York Go Lang Meetup group.