New media installation Aksioma | Project Space
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana, Slovenia
12 – 28 October 2011
Artist's presentation and exhibition opening: Wednesday, 12 October 2011 at 8 PM
Time Slip is a text display which continuously presents news from the future as computer software transcribes official news agency online newscasts from the grammatical past tense to the future tense: “the NASDAQ will drop 4.3 points today”, “A plane crash in Madrid will kill 153 people”, “The Giants will crush the RedSocks 10 to 3”… A fascinating impression of knowing the future arises and transfigures the installation into an apparent oracle.
Time Slip is always up to date. It is a programmed generative artwork.
For the spectator, it is as if he was projected in the past of a few hours and that someone told him the future: feeling of going back in time. Or for someone who would not already know the news, it would be like if an oracle would predict the future: feeling of anxiety or of perverse full power. In all cases it is a work that unsettles and generates uneasiness by introducing a crack in the flow of time. All the more because it uses graphic codes and display contexts usually attached to real news.
Time Slip is a visual artwork referring to philosophical questionings on destiny, its potential pre-written nature or its causal determinism, and in the end, a work on free will. It confronts the spectator to the control of his own destiny in a universe where time and its causality can slip. It is also a work on the motive energy of unpredictability and risk, more
and more central in the contemporary world.
There is still an escape door for the spectator through the realization of the essential vanity of this system which pretends to know what will happen, but which in fact knows nothing. But this door is not easy to find.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Artist and programming engineer Antoine Schmitt creates installations, situations and objects, minimal and abstract, anchored in time and movement, that address the modalities of the free being in the system of reality. With reference to a systemic contemporary world, Schmitt places programming, an artistic medium that he considers radically new because of its active dimension, at the core of most of his artworks to challenge the forces in play, and their form. He has, alone or through collaborations, fostered confrontations with this approach in more established artistic fields like music, dance, architecture, literature and cinema, whose codes he re-examines. As a theorist, jury spokesman, and editor of the gratin.org
portal, Schmitt explores the field of programmed art. Antoine Schmitt lives and works in Paris.