The installation comprises:

- One slide projection (gathering two sets of 35 mm color slide films) with timer control,

synchronized in half-second intervals from one to the other. The Carousel project occurred at different times during the artist’s visits to a zoo building in Chiang Mai, North of Thailand.

 

- 8 color prints of year signage along the route to Exit Glacier, in Alaska, which documents the distance between its recession and its maximum extent in 1815 and the present. They are mounted as a constellation on the wall.

 

- Fishing ropes placed on the floor, used to measure the signs in Alaska and later used for installing those signs' photographs at the extent of actual length.

 

Pratchaya Phinthong was alerted  about a controversial city project: the Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand is trying to build a "Polar World." The artist went there pretending to be a tourist. He asked the contractor to enter the troubled building site and took some construction details.

 

The double slide show relates the artist's itinerary, capturing failure and ambiguity in such projects and showing the gap between the economic reasons for boosting tourism and the reality of polar animals’ welfare.

 

In 2012, we learned that polar bears would not be displayed inside the building after all. It was rumored that the building would allow visitors to experience temperatures similar to those in the Arctic and Antarctic. The artist returned to see how it had been reshaped. This time, he pretended to be an architect seeking to capture good shots of the city for a project.

 

On the other side of the planet, Pratchaya Phinthong measured the signs of melted ice in Alaska with a fishing line. Those dates are 1815, 1889, 1894,1899, 1917, 1926, 1951, and 1961, respectively. The receding of ice allows trees to grow year after year. Scientists use Dendrochronology, known as "tree rings," to date the ice receding periods. However, the only recorded instance of a missing ring in oak trees occurred in 1816, also known as the "Year Without a Summer". 

 

Scientists began with the year 1815 because it was the year of the significant volcanic eruptions of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which later resulted in a worldwide cooling temperature and harvest failure over Alaska and the Northern Hemisphere.

 

Pratchaya Phinthong marked the measurements between signs with lead fishing weights

and photographs. Then, he rolled the fishing line into a spherical shape.

Wherever the work will be installed, the artist will unroll the fishing line anticlockwise,

The line will be looped within the room, and each time the mark of each year appears.

The photo will be placed up on the wall, till it last.​ The artist will roll it back into a spherical shape and then leave it on the floor.

 

Pratchaya Phinthong adopts a recurrent method for developing his projects: starting from two distant points, his work fills the interval between space and time.

 

The artist links a tropical region where men produce ice to the far North Pole, where a volcanic eruption has impacted the climate. His intimate connection (usually as a journey) will create an artistic form. Those measurements will then be replayed inside the white cube, and the memory of a place or a moment will become a piece.