A melting in the here and now

Olafur Eliasson’s ice chunks are an example of materially temporal indexes. Their layers, though not visible to the naked eye, have built up over millennia of snow fall at the glacial site from which they were sourced. Through this, these objects engage strongly with a sense of time past. But they ofer a diferent kind of temporal index too. Ice melts, and as it does it engages with a sense of time passing - passing in the here and now. In Eliasson’s transported hunks of glacier, a material property of ice (its melting point) has given rise to a process (melting) that is itself an index of immediate time-passing, the perpetual refreshing of kairos as well as the slow build up of chronos.19