.299792458

In a pitch-black room, there’s a sudden flash of light followed by a steady ticking. A counter appears projected on a wall, accumulating nanoseconds at a speed about a billion times slowed down. Eventually, the projection offers more: The illuminated outline of a shoe appears, then the light source travels up legs and onto a torso until it finally hits a face. Once it reaches the wall, a bright circle of light emanates outward, then all goes black. It almost looks like a grainy movie of someone scanning a seated person with a flash light, illuminating each portion of their body separately to create a mysterious, fluid animation rather than a static image. Actually, though, it’s SEEC photography. That’s “see” and “C,” the mathematic term for the speed of light. SEEC was created through the collaboration of quantum physicists Thomas Juffmann and Philipp Haslinger and photographer Enar De Dios Rodríguez as an experiment in visualizing the speed of light and the way that photography works. First, they shot their subjects with a super fast laser. Then, using a custom camera with a hyper-fast shutter, they continuously captured the photons as they bounced back off the subject — visualizing the delay it takes for light to hit objects that are further away. Now, a collection of their photosets are on view at Aggregate Space Gallery in the show 299792458. Highly recommended.