On June 7, The Time Keeper opened at the IMAL Center in Brussels — a traveling group exhibition touring through Brussels, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Istanbul, and Brooklyn, New York. The artists presenting their work were Alexandra Dementieva, Anna Frants, and Aernoudt Jacobs.
The project was supported by cultural and artistic institutions including VGC, Imal, and Adem in Brussels, and CYLAND MediaLab in both St. Petersburg and Berlin. The exhibition focused on the theme of Time, exploring its various dimensions — present, past, and future — from an artistic perspective and through the lens of contemporary societal perceptions.
The many expressions of Time also interact with human psycho-physical factors, mediated by the arts — whether visual, musical, or installation-based. The result is a comprehensive view of contemporary art’s take on the complexity of the temporal dimension, approached from various (creative) perspectives.
The artistic contributions from these three artists not only stimulate aesthetic responses, but also provoke personal reflection, since investigating Time is inherently an open act of exploration.
Shadows is an installation by Anna Frants, an internationally recognized artist and curator active between Russia and New York. Her works have been exhibited across Europe and the United States. This particular new project was developed at CYLAND MediaLab and premiered at this event. The tools used in this interactive piece include a projector, proximity sensors, speakers, and programming devices. Frants creates a multisensory, audio-visual environment that actively involves the viewer. The abstract idea of time becomes tangible, encouraging each spectator to develop a personal and intimate perception, ultimately showing that Time is undeniably a subjective dimension.
The projected videos are fragments of external realities, which the audience connects to through memory and visual associations, exploring temporal distances. The key elements in this work are interaction and synthetic environments.
Breathless is the work of Alexandra Dementieva, an artist whose research focuses on social psychology and perception within the context of multimedia art. Her installations often aim to reveal the complexity of human perception in relation both to the artwork and to the viewer.
This installation features three LED objects. Two of them — shaped like cylindrical spirals — are connected to an online RSS feed, while the third object, through an anemometer and sound sensors, captures air and sound input from the surrounding environment. A computer searches the web for two different words simultaneously, and the intensity of the light emitted by the objects increases according to their frequency on the Internet.
Up close, the viewer can interact by blowing onto the sensors, thereby giving the objects more “life.” Essentially, three elements determine the lighting: human presence (breath), external reality (ambient noise), and virtual elements (words).
Through this piece, not only are invisible objects given visual substance, but human and natural factors are also made measurable. The metaphor of light, furthermore, represents a conceptual link to reflections on visible/invisible, presence/absence, and virtual/real.
The third artist (and musician), Aernoudt Jacobs, is based in Brussels. His main focus lies in different modes of field recording, often in conjunction with experimental contexts. His installation for The Time Keeper, titled Glaz-Maton, is a sound-based work that utilizes musical box technology. It is fundamentally acoustic, with the box serving as a basic acoustic resonator — devoid of any electronic components.
What makes it compelling is the data recognition instrument (primarily detecting iris color, heart rate rhythm, and hand moisture) that is made available to the audience. Through this device, the principle of the music box is altered, allowing participants to intervene in an objective process — the recording of data. At the end of the process, a unique and personalized melody is created for each viewer, generated from their personal biometric data. Each cassette had been prepared to produce different sounds. The resulting sounds are audible outputs of invisible traits.
With a final overview of all three works, one could say that while Shadows presents a subjective idea of time, Breathless offers a more physical and conceptual interpretation. The third, Glaz-Maton, addresses the auditory aspects of temporality. These are three different approaches to the same profound and eternal dimension in which we are all immersed: Time.
