So it goes
"Well, here we are Mr Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
This installation was developed for a one evening event which took place on the 11th floor of an abandoned office building. 26 artists where asked to create a small piece of max 3 min. All these pieces were to be shown or performed in consecutive order. The event was organized by 2m3 and took place in the beginning of 2014 in Brussels.
So it goes... was my contribution to this event. In the main corridor of the space, the original suspended ceiling was modified. Like in many office buildings the ceiling consisted of small strips of metal attached to a suspended framework. Some of the individual strips were removed from the framework and equipped with electromagnets to hold them in place on the ceiling. From a computer the electromagnet on each individual strip could be controlled. Switching off the power would cause a strip to come down.
The installation was activated at an in between moment at which people were moving from one performance to the other. - Although there was some staging to make sure people would not be harmed. - It began with a couple of individual strips falling at intermittent timing. This to grab peoples attention. Once the corridor was filled with people seeing what was happening, the remaining strips all came down. At which moment the corridor lights went out. Immediately followed by a chiming sound and coloured light coming from the ceiling.
As this installation is all about living the moment or experiencing the present time, the accompanying quote comes from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, in which a tralfamadorian explains Billy Pilgrim how to deal with experiencing reality in four dimensions, being able to perceive past, present and future at at any point in time.
"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it by the moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."
This attitude towards time, which turns the main character real placid about anything what the current moment brings and it's implications on what lies ahead in the future, seems quiet opposite to how we live our time. We live in a continuous now enabled by email, twitter, facebook, the so-called real time technological shift. Everything is always on. We try to catch up to anything which is happening now and struggle through the onslaught of information which is coming at us. But are we catching up? Maybe this now is elusive, something we can never quite reach. Maybe we are just completely scheduled in and not really able to get a handle on the present. "Douglas Rushkoff : Present shock"
This installation is intended as an act gratuite, as proposed by Pierre Huyghe to resist the condition of time as product, experience the moment and get a handle on the present.
The following is a registration made on the evening of the event.
The following is a registration made a couple of days later without an audience.
Related works:
Time is a technology
2m3
