Seven-League Dolomites.

After spending many summer holidays trekking through the Swiss Alps, Dutch artist Roel Wouters decided to take his walking boots to the Dolomites. Upon entering the Italian mountain range time and space seemed to behave differently here. Roel recollected walking for days through Swiss mountain passes, making only slow progress. Yet in The Dolomites it was as if his memories of Switzerland were fast-forwarding. In the Swiss Alps it had taken days to move from peak to peak but in the Dolomites it was as if he wore seven-league boots, passing over several mountains each day.

After contemplating this fundamentally altered experience it occured to him that the Dolomites and Swiss Alps have a very different environmental rhythm to them. Swiss mountains have greater height and size and are far apart. The Dolomite peaks didn’t reach the same heights but were cropped much more closely together. Distances between peaks were shorter, as they towered over those walking among them, confusing our understanding of scale. This condensed experience created a sense of acceleration of both time and space that triggered the estrangement Wouters felt. We call this experience of spacetime the Dolomitian Acceleration. As humans become taller, the planet is smaller in comparison. As a result we speed through time and space, while we seem to have less of both.

Alternatively, shrinking the human species could inspire an Alpine Deceleration, defined by an experience of increased time and space.