Antoine Schmitt: TIME SLIP

Title:

TIME SLIP

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2008

Art Event Overview:

On a public display, a news ticker continuously shows news in scrolling text. The news items are, however, conjugated in the future tense: ‘the NASDAQ will drop 4.3 points today’, ‘A plane will crash in Madrid killing 153 people’, ‘The Giants will crush the Red Socks 10–3’. Aside from the tense of the verbs, all the news is completely true… TIME SLIP is a visual artwork anchored in philosophical questionings about destiny, its potentially predetermined nature and its causal determinism. It is also a work about free will in a universe where time and causality can ‘slip’. It confronts the spectator with the control of his or her own destiny. It is also a work engaging with the motifs of unpredictability and risk, which are increasingly central in the contemporary world. TIME SLIP is based on custom-built software that feeds from official news agencies, changing the tense of selected news items from near past to near future. TIME SLIP is always current. It is a programmed generative artwork.

Full text (PDF) p. 89-93