time fractures

time fractures
sound installation
BS Projects 2013-2014 -exhibition, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (22.10.-7.11.2014)

Braunschweig PROJECTS 2013-2014

Photo by: Frank Sperling

“Time Fractures” is a sound installation about different sonicification of time and the artificial concept of our time itself.

Atomic clock gives us the scientific concept of a second. There is an atomic clock in Braunschweig at the PTB institute. In the clock caesium atoms are evaporated and after 9 192 631 770 periods one second has elapsed. This is hardly a natural phenomenon. Human kind needs to have a strict, rigorous concept of time, which is for nature totally unnecessary, so our concept of time is in a sense completely artificial.

“Time Fractures” also links the concept of time to music. In a sense making, playing or listening to music is an act of time keeping. Almost all genres of music are tied to more or less strict time signatures. It seems that music is needed to make sense of time.

The installation consist of two objects placed on a table; a wooden clock and a wooden metronome. Back of each is a small transducer speaker which vibrate the wooden objects. A generative program plays and modulates randomly different sonificiations of time; different metronome time signatures, clock samples, time values in English, Finnish, Swedish and German sampled from talking clocks, the sonification of the PTB atomic clock signal and other time sounds. The program randomly modulates the the different signals creating a highly unstable, unreliable clock/metronome. Sounds will be heard from the clock and from the metronome, but not at the same time. The program chooses the output object also randomly.

Braunschweig PROJECTS 2013-2014

Photo by: Frank Sperling