T A M E D T I M E
“There is no clock in the forest”
-- William Shakespeare
The project is a reflection on time, which has become institutionalized and tamed. Video-installation pictures clocks, taken out of a conventional context and placed in wild surroundings. By the dissonance and absurdity of the image, the work contrasts a contemporary attitude to time and attitudes, rooted in natural rhythms.
Modern chronological life is determined by predictability of time. We wake up, work, and have meals at fixed hours. We have fun at fixed hours. We forget spontaneity and lose understanding of our true time needs. We run out of kairological experiences of living within the moment. Clocks become an incarnation of universal homogeneous time.
When western missionaries come to “civilize” indigenous people, they would bring the clocks and introduce the concept of time, money and working hours. The wild time, before all belonging to the people, now becomes tamed, reduced to the clock-face and continuous counting, measuring and dividing. Lakota peoples don’t have a word for “late” or “waiting”. Inuit peoples have no word equivalent to time. Most of indigenous communities don’t have an abstract idea of time, living in the now, being present in the environment, having acute understanding of its signals: birds songs, moon and stars, sun, nyctinasty of the plants, ocean’s ebbs and tides. In a city of artificial light, the only way to tell the time is the clocks.
Mountain, Forest, River, Wild Grass – knows neither the hours, nor the seconds. Nature is full of time. Apples ripe when it’s time. Do we own our own time? Or all we can own is watches on a gold-strap?
The video contains 13 scenes, 12 for every hour or every month, and the 13th is for the wild hour, or for the lunar 13th month. The soundscape is a dialog of mechanical ticking and the natural sound of the waves. Rivers, seas and oceans are often being thought of as the very soul of time, they represent both the flow of time and the eternity. In the end of the 12th scene the sound of the ocean takes over the sound of the ticking and the clocks fall; in the final 13th scene the clocks are being carried away, devoured by the wet sea waves. The image of the clocks taken by the wet element is a hope for the time being truly lived, not imposed by dry clock’s tick-tack.
-- William Shakespeare
The project is a reflection on time, which has become institutionalized and tamed. Video-installation pictures clocks, taken out of a conventional context and placed in wild surroundings. By the dissonance and absurdity of the image, the work contrasts a contemporary attitude to time and attitudes, rooted in natural rhythms.
Modern chronological life is determined by predictability of time. We wake up, work, and have meals at fixed hours. We have fun at fixed hours. We forget spontaneity and lose understanding of our true time needs. We run out of kairological experiences of living within the moment. Clocks become an incarnation of universal homogeneous time.
When western missionaries come to “civilize” indigenous people, they would bring the clocks and introduce the concept of time, money and working hours. The wild time, before all belonging to the people, now becomes tamed, reduced to the clock-face and continuous counting, measuring and dividing. Lakota peoples don’t have a word for “late” or “waiting”. Inuit peoples have no word equivalent to time. Most of indigenous communities don’t have an abstract idea of time, living in the now, being present in the environment, having acute understanding of its signals: birds songs, moon and stars, sun, nyctinasty of the plants, ocean’s ebbs and tides. In a city of artificial light, the only way to tell the time is the clocks.
Mountain, Forest, River, Wild Grass – knows neither the hours, nor the seconds. Nature is full of time. Apples ripe when it’s time. Do we own our own time? Or all we can own is watches on a gold-strap?
The video contains 13 scenes, 12 for every hour or every month, and the 13th is for the wild hour, or for the lunar 13th month. The soundscape is a dialog of mechanical ticking and the natural sound of the waves. Rivers, seas and oceans are often being thought of as the very soul of time, they represent both the flow of time and the eternity. In the end of the 12th scene the sound of the ocean takes over the sound of the ticking and the clocks fall; in the final 13th scene the clocks are being carried away, devoured by the wet sea waves. The image of the clocks taken by the wet element is a hope for the time being truly lived, not imposed by dry clock’s tick-tack.
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