Photographie Métrique

The French Revolution is widely considered as the inauguration of the modern era and the modern nation state. This is partly due to the French National Assembly’s efforts to implement standardization across that nation. This endeavor included the development of the meter, the kilo, and the liter—measurements free of the, until then common, imperial referents and instead based on purely “scientific” premises.

During a 2004 residency in Paris, local participants were asked to gesturally estimate the length of a meter.