Piotr Szyhalski: Die Zeitstücke (Timeworks)
Artist(s):
Title:
- Die Zeitstücke (Timeworks)
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2000
Medium:
- Interactive installation
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
Die Zeitstücke explores the idea of human experience as the pivotal point in our perception of time. In this body of work, the user is invited not only to experience time in different ways, but to engage in its manipulation. This tampering with time occurs in a variety of manners: from unintentional loss of a few seconds here, to deliberate and absolute halt of the flow for minutes there, from attentive search for meaning in passing time to violent hurtling up and down the visible timeline, from desperate attempts to work against the relentlessness of time to quiet acceptance of the shifting physical manifestations of it.
Our understanding of “objective” time takes place largely due to our acceptance of time-measuring devices and the recognition of these objects as nearly synonymous to the idea of time itself. In Die Zeitstücke, the concept of time functions as a device to reflect on (and quantify?) such elusive themes as memory, faith, knowledge, and mortality.
Each component of Die Zeitstücke slowly but methodically evolves, creating a sense of continuous texture that is only fragmentarily experienced by the user. Soft, organic images of the human body combined with sharp grids and the mechanics of numeric display further emphasize the tensions between the subjectivity and the science of time.
The work combines all three dimensions of memory. As a device, it “remembers” every mousedown that users input during the display and allows retrieval of those records. Unearthing these moments in time creates the illusion of a “journey into the past” and, at the same time, becomes a form of “intelligence” collection, a surveillance procedure.
