The Time Keeper: 3 artists explore about the concept of Time

An article by Silvia Bertoletti describes the traveling group exhibition about Time
Posted on: 8 August 2012

www.digitalmeetsculture.net /web.archive.org/

A traveling group exhibition examining the presence of past, present and future… between St Petersburg, Brussels, Istanbul, Berlin and Brooklyn. Three artists developed the theme of Time in its different dimensions (the present, the past and the future): Alexandra Dementieva, Anna Frants & Aernoudt Jacobs.


About the show:

Unconditional and indiscriminating, “Time” is an impetus. It ignites one’s obligation to a larger history, motivates to understand and be understood, drives to create something more meaningful than oneself, defines purpose. Society universally recognizes all of this. How people internalize, distinguish themselves and communicate these concepts of “Time“ makes them an individual.

Every inclusion in “The Time Keeper” communicates a different perspective of “Time” and gives insight into what makes that artist’s view unique.

The installations:

As Silvia Bertoletti describes in her article appeared on Digicult:

“Shadows is an installation presented by Anna Frants, a new media artist and curator living between Russia and New York. (…) The artist created a multi-sensorial environment, actively involving the audience in a visual and acoustic situation. The abstract idea of time becomes visual, developing in the viewer a personal and inner perception of it, aimed at showing that Time is definitely a subjective dimension.”

Shadows

Shadows

“Breathless is the work of Alexandra Dementieva, an artist who mainly focuses her research on social psychology and perception in a multimedia arts context. The project presented here consists of three LED objects. Two of them, some sort of cylindrical spirals, are connected to a RSS feed on the web, while the third one, using airspeed and sound sensors, captures air and noise inputs coming from the surrounding environment. The PC searches the web for two different words at a time. The intensity of the light object increases according to their location on the www.

The viewer can also interact and bring “more brightness” to the objects by blowing on airspeed senses located on them. There are three elements linked to the illumination pattern: human presence (breathing), external reality (environment noises) and virtual elements (words).”

Breathless

“The third artist was Arnaud Jacobs, a Brussels based musician and artist. His main interest lies in the different modalities of field recordings, often in association with an experimental context. The installation presented for Time Keeper is Glaz-Maton, a sound work based on the musical box technology, basically an acoustic version of it, since the box around the instrument is a simple acoustic resonator, with nothing electronic.”

Glaz-Maton

The melody is unique for each visitor, because they are a sonorous synthesis of a biometric snapshot of the visitor, registering 3 personal attributes: colors of the iris, the heartbeat rate and the humidity of the hands. This data is synthesized into unique melody. The iris reader determines the pitch of notes, a tool for tracking the heartbeat rate modifies the tempo, the humidity sends the pauses between the notes.

Read the full article:
http://www.digicult.it/news/the-time-keeper-a-traveling-group-exhibition-examining-the-presence-of-past-present-and-future/

Read about the Brussels exhibition that took place in June 2012 at Imal Center:
http://www.imal.org/en/activity/time-keeper