Duration/4D Installation
October 10-17, 2006/Gallery 1.2.3
Image: T. Stanley
Some lexicographic sources have suggested that time is the most frequently used noun in the English language. Our language and culture may indeed share a bias towards linear time. We show a deep inclination towards organizing experience along the temporal dimension and have adopted many unique innovations for standardizing the measurement of time on both very small (atomic clocks) and relatively large (leap year) scales. Organized violent conflict, war, has also been used to standardize our translation through time on the largest of scales – the expanse of history. Even in our contemporary educational system, wars still stand as bloody bookmarks between epochal movements, gory punctuation and mnemonic aids for the narrative of social time. But what of a great and endless war? How does an open-ended conflict with shifting fronts and ambiguously defined enemies upset this general schema? Where is the opportunity for postscript and reflection in a war that lacks a curtain call?
Duration is a sound sculpture offered as a place for reflection on the interrelationship between our perception of time and the enduring human project of war. It is composed of three separate sound sources of varying length playing continuously in a space conducive to deep listening. As the mix playing on each sound source repeats, the three constituent mixes align and interact in unpredictable ways. In effect, Duration is a composition that is continually rearranging itself. The cycle is designed to produce novel sonic configurations throughout the course of its installation in the gallery. Listeners are encouraged to visit often. No two listenings are the same.
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live,when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.For this purpose it need not be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. Henri Bergson |
O Krishna, seeing these my relatives,met together desirous of battle,my limbs are failing and my mouth is parched. My body trembles; my hair stands on end. The sacred bow Gandiva slips away from my grip, and my skin is afire. Neither can I remain standing upright. My mind is rambling; and, O Keshava, I behold evil omens. Bhagavad Gita |