A Tempo
Project Proposal 2022
What is time?
Where do we come from, and where are we going?
How can the present moment be measured?
Can the individual’s experience of the ephemeral suggest a new axis of time?
Amidst the fleeting experience of our world, what is to be regarded as eternal?
My research covers the contemplation of ephemerality in solitude. My aim is to disrupt ideas of standard, culturally-imposed units of time measurement and focus on another way of looking at our sense of time, grounded in the subjective experience of an individual’s body and perception. Einstein observed that the conception of time was an illusion. Although time can be mathematically measured, the nature of time cannot be defined except by today’s scientific theory. Time is merely an abstraction of change within the world.
This project carefully arranges for the interaction of a human body with a specific setting to create a ‘subjective’ clock. In the context of an interactive scenography, the performer envisages their own time-system constructed from their own biological rhythms. The manifestation of this time-scape encompasses shifting light and darkness, that alternatively reveals and conceals the performer’s presence on stage. The project aims to convey the indispensable reciprocity between time and a subject, asking whether we exist in time or whether time exists in us.
A performer in the middle of the stage is connected to a circular kinetic lighting system, which reinterprets the rotational solar system. This time, the subject becomes an axis, and the light (or quasi-sun) rotates around the subject. Always directed toward the performer in the centre, the light casts an elongated shadow of the figure that rotates through 360 degrees – performing like a clock hand yet equally an illusory silhouette.
The kinetic lighting system surrounding the performer is programmed to function along with a bio-signal interface in real-time, and so it responds to the shifting emotions and perceptions of the performer. The performer’s EEG (Electroencephalogram) will be measured and used to determine the speed of a light source rotating on the rail from the left to the right, so any change in psychological or emotional status will affect the pace of the suggested time-scape. Additionally, the performer’s heartbeat will be measured to control the light’s intensity, ultimately generating a flashing effect according to the rhythm of the heartbeat. Inspired by Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Big Bang Fountain’, where a strobe light catches a glimpse of each water-burst’s upward motion instead of showing the entire arc of the water’s movement, the system will only reveal a glimpse of the performer’s movement in every pulse.
