Time Experiment (2007)

Time experiment creates an temporal augmentation in the space. The installation could be defined as a mirror with memory. Lacan argues that self-knowledge is an illusion as the human mind is not a unified whole. His “mirror stage” – theory is a model for the relationship between the “I” and the image itself. Having an image of oneself is part of human reality. We are always, in a sense, “someone else” insofar as the image is perceived as separate from us. The multitude of unseen eyes in social networks increases the distance between the “I” and the image, because only the image is visible for their gaze, while the “I” remains hidden. The pleasure of watching us as others disappears with the lost connection between the image and the “I”. The panoptic gaze has been inverted, but the fear of being seen has transformed into fear of not being seen. The installation reconnects people with their own image in a seemingly un-technological environment, in a familiar and intuitive way. The immediate past is transformed into a temporal extension, which is constantly updated by the events in the space. The seamless flow of reality is spliced into short random loops, which can be seen as a timeline of events. Traces of people’s movements become tools for an ephemeral social play. People are aware of themselves and others, while their captured presence works as an interface to the augmentation in time. The logic of surveillance, control and monitoring is transformed into a series of observations about one’s own body, movement and relation to others.	Programming : Lauri HyvärinenProduction support: AVEK Arts Council of FinlandWatch video documentation (10 min.)