Sun is a digital triptych inspired by the total solar eclipse of August 12, 2026.
At Sun's centre is a system poem built from nine words arranged in a three-by-three matrix: three plural nouns (apertures, auguries, apparitions), three verbs (align, thicken, emerge), and three adverbs (rhythmically, vertically, recursively).
Across two syntactic orders, the matrix generates 432 lawful variants. Most will never be read. The system poem returns to a 2011 precursor and resolves a grammatical fault carried in that earlier form.
Three video panels — Aperture, Augury, Apparition — follow the poem's semantic axis: opening, reading, appearing.
The triad is rotatable. It maps onto Sun–Earth–Human, onto curator–artist–artwork, onto noun–verb–adverb.
An eclipse and a sentence share a structure: something comes into view by something else being withheld. The Greek ekleipsis (a leaving out) stands against phaínesthai, to come into appearance.
This eclipse belongs to Saros 126, a cycle of 72 solar events running from 1179 to 2459; the poem's 432 variants yield six per eclipse across thirteen centuries. The Saros and the system-poem are the same kind of machine: both take a small set of elements and produce their outcomes by rearrangement.
Framing the triptych are two further passages, Aletheia and Arché. Aletheia recalls the Byzantine hinged icon, the portable altar whose side panels fold to protect a sacred centre — the genre's theological inheritance, and the hinge as its defining mechanism. Arché frames the work's precedent within Western art history: Howard Russell Butler's 1918/1923/1925 eclipse triptych.
The triptych has a visible face and a hidden one. Most of the poem, like most of an eclipse, remains in reserve.
For more information, see: Sun: A Triptych for the Solar Eclipse.