Time is a technology

“There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.” America, Jean Baudrillard

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A stone is dragged through the space using a hoist. The movement is so slow that it is hardly visible. The sound of the stone moving across grains of sand is picked up by microphones inside the stone and this sound is amplified through copper plates serving as loudspeakers. The extremely slow movement magnifies, as it were, each point of contact, making time tangible – or rather: audible – through the creaking and grating sounds. As the day progresses, the sound cumulates into an increasingly richer and fuller sound. At the end of the day, the sounds become a recording of the amount of energy necessary to move the stone. Like in his other works, the artist Gert Aertsen here reflects on the relationship between time and technology in our current information society. Aertsen tries to reverse this relationship and make it slow down rather than wanting to continue increasing its speed.

This installation is part of a series of works which focus on time and our experience of time. In this particular case time is stretched and recondensed.

In case of the setup for the Sense of Sound Exhibition at Z33, it took about six hours to hoist the stone from one side of the room to the other. This coincided more or less with the opening hours of the exhibition. Each morning the stone had to be put back in place.

Image Gallery

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All images are taken from the Sense of Sound exhibition in Hasselt which opened in march 2014. Courtesy to

Video

Footage from the Z33 exhibition, Sense of Sound,

This piece originated from a collaboration with David Debuyser, State of stability and was previously shown in different exploratory setups.
The footage below comes from one of these setups. More information about State of stability

Related works

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So it goes & 2m3

Code

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I'm using a discontinued magnetic rotary encoder v2.1 from makerbot. The arduino code for it i found here : https://web.archive.org/web/20120105015729/http://wiki.makerbot.com/mre2

#define ENCODER_A_PIN 2
#define ENCODER_B_PIN 3

long position;

void setup()
{   
Serial.begin(19200);   
Serial.println("Started");    
pinMode(ENCODER_A_PIN, INPUT);   
pinMode(ENCODER_B_PIN, INPUT);    
attachInterrupt(0, read_quadrature, CHANGE);
} 


void loop()
{   
Serial.print("Position: ");   
Serial.println(position, DEC);   
delay(1000);
} 


 void read_quadrature()
{    
// found a low-to-high on channel A  
if (digitalRead(ENCODER_A_PIN) == HIGH)  
{      
// check channel B to see which way   
if (digitalRead(ENCODER_B_PIN) == LOW)       
position++;    
else       
position--;  
}  // found a high-to-low on channel A  
else                                          
{    
// check channel B to see which way    
if (digitalRead(ENCODER_B_PIN) == LOW)        
position--;    
else        
position++;  
}
}