TIME SLIP

by Antoine Schmitt (FR)

About TIME SLIP

On the screen or on a public display, a news ticker constantly displays scrolling textual news, but these news are conjugated at the future tense : "Obama will get 53% of the votes in Arkansas", "A plane crash in Madrid will kill 153 people", "the NASDAQ will drop 4.3 points today". Apart from the tense of the verbs, all the news are completely true...
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 tell her the future in advance : 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.

TIME SLIP is based on a custom software that feeds from the official news agencies and changes the tense of selected news from past or present to future tense. TIME SLIP is always up to date. It is a programmed generative artwork.

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http://www.gratin.org/timeslip