Time is Speeding Up – frame number 1934

This networked video performance and installation is about how life seems to speed up as we get older; based on the reflection that when I was one day old, a day was my whole life but on the second day one day was only half my life etc.

Version two is being created in real-time 17-22 January for London Art Fair 2017. Watch the live networked video unfold here.

The work was originally commissioned for ‘We Are Not Alone’, an exhibition about how the Internet has changed all our lives curated by artist, Michael Szpakowski for 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK. The exhibition catalogue includes an essay about this work by Edward Picot and can be downloaded here.

Watch the final video of Time is speeding up in Scunthorpe.

During exhibition opening hours between 23rd January -24th April 2016, viewers could watch a live looping video online. At the exhibition people could pose for the web cam, or might be caught looking at the video in which they were soon to be portrayed.

Using a computer programme called Geological Time Piece that I created with Gareth Foote a still webcam image was captured every 3-5 minutes during exhibition opening hours. The camera pointed at a wall in the gallery, upon which a changing text was displayed. The software added each image as a frame to a looping video, of fixed 3 minute duration. The frame density increased every 3 minutes, as each images was added to the video.

Time is Speeding up, installation at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre

View images of the Scunthorpe installation on Flickr

In the exhibition space full of movement – of light and shade and people coming and going – people could insert themselves into the video by standing between the webcam and the text. Over three months the human presences started to flicker and disappear and the moving image progressively conveyed a more geological sense of time, the arc of daylight moving through the space, the architecture, and other more static things came to dominate the image.The computer programme stopped running when the exhibition closed by which time the video contained over 3600 images. And the final video runs for a minute at 60fps.

Every day the most recent video to have been created was stored and registered with Acribe.io the blockchain-based social platform thus using cryptographic ID to secure attribution and provenance of artworks and locking in the presence of all participants.

Exhibited 23rd January – 23rd April 2016 at 20/21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK and online. Each day @timespeedsup shared a new video and images to observe time speeding up and people fading away.