Last week I was in Washington DC, at a workshop on the future of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. Not the most obvious moment to encounter works that provide opportunities to reflect on contemplation and technology, but life is full of surprises.

When I'm in DC, I tend to make a pilgrimage to the National Mall, and visit some of the museums. This time I checked out the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. If the Smithsonian museums were the sisters in Pride and Prejudice, the Hirshhorn would be Mary Bennet as played by Talulah Riley: not much on the outside, but with unrealized inner depth.

I wandered downstairs to the ColorForms exhibition, and more or less stumbled into James Turrell's Milk Run. It's a room-sized piece (see below), which you enter through a completely dark little maze.

milk run, via flickr

Once you're in the room, it takes your eyes a couple minutes to adjust, and gradually you see the piece: a set of projections against the far wall. There's a long-exposure photograph on the exhibition Web site, but it doesn't really do justice at all to the experience of being in the room.

First, because it's so faint, your eyes and brain have to work pretty hard to make sense of the piece: for example, after several minutes I found the color of the piece changing as I looked at different parts of it, and while I knew it was an optical illusion– my eyes were working overtime to put meaning to the limited number of photons it had to work with– it was a pretty compelling part of the experience. Indeed, seeing a piece that's at the edge of your vision was a cool reminder that all vision is an active thing, an interpretive act rather than a passive one. Finally, the piece demanded a contemplative attitude: the fact that you couldn't see it unless you had the patience to let your eyes adjust to the low light nicely illustrates how, in order to see some things clearly, you have to slow down and be patient.

From there, I wandered over to the National Gallery of Art's East Building. I've been a fan of I. M. Pei's building since reading about it in the Smithsonian about 30 years ago, and while Pei's work often has a slightly anonymous corporate smoothness, I still find the gallery pretty compelling.

There was a Nam June Paik exhibit in the tower, so I headed straight for that. (In my last visit to the gallery, I was completely floored by the Rothko exhibit in the tower, so I now tend to start at the top and work my way down.)

The Paik did not disappoint: the room was dominated by One Candle, Candle Projection, which dates from 1988, and has been staged several times. As the Gallery explains, it is

Each morning a candle is lit and a video camera follows its progress, casting its flickering, magnified, processed image onto the walls in myriad projections. It is a central work in Paik's oeuvre for its simultaneous embrace of media overload and Zen simplicity, participation and contemplation. By turns steady as a rock and flickering in the air currents stirred by visitors, the flame is stillness in motion, a paradox magnified by its reproduction on the walls.

via flickr

The second major piece in the tower was Standing Buddha with Outstretched Hand (2005), a Buddha sculpture pointed at a set of video monitors that project images of the statue.

via flickr

The two pieces together were fantastic. They didn't require the same level of physical engagement as Milk Money, in the sense that you didn't have to struggle to see them, but they were quite powerfully staged.

via flickr

One Candle, Candle Projection nicely illustrates how you can use technology and a hyper-modern space to create a deeply contemplative environment and experience: there piece depends completely on high-resolution projectors, but the burn of the candle, and its gentle response to the presence of viewers in the room, encourage you to match its slow pace.

Paik's work reminds you that when thoughtfully designed, technologies don't have to make you hurry: there's nothing inherent in technology that demands you rush. It's all about how you use them, and how others use them to make you think about time and yourself.