The 200 Year Continuum

• Christian Kerrigan

• SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life

Category:

• Paper

• The 200 Year Continuum is the producer, recorder, and exhibitor in Christian Kerrigan’s advancing anthology of narratives. Central to Kerrigan’s practice is storytelling and mythmaking as a means of engaging his audience. Kerrigan uses drawing as his primary mode of research into these narratives, which are consequently offered in the form of live internet-feed installations acting as ecological sites, scientific experiments introducing new organic technologies, and digital images of worlds unseen. Each addition acts as a “middle story” within The 200 Year Continuum. In his narrative, The Amber Clock, a ship is grown in the yew forest of Kingley Vale over a period of 200 years. The narrative explores the possibilities of time in relationship to technology and the natural world. In his narrative, artificial and wild systems are choreographed, and the natural production of resin is harvested from the yew trees as a way of measuring time.

• 1. C. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, We Go This Way (London: Violette Editions, 1998) 36.

  2. Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art London, Charles Avery The Islanders: An Introduction: http://www.parasol-unit.org/index.php?id=313.

  3. N. Spiller, “Deformography: the poetics of cybridised architecture”: http://www.surrealismcentre. ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal4/acrobat%20files/Spillerpdf.pdf (2005).

  4. I. Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber and Faber, 1997) 157.

  5. N. Spiller, Cyber Reader: Vacillating Objects (London: Phaidon, 2002) 306.

  6. S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Rime_Ancient_Mariner.html.

  7. (op. cit.) Gibson.