Time Squares
On „Time Squares“ The loss of spatio-temporal relations enforces feelings of uncertainty and fear. „Time squares“ captures the states of mind of individuals under the pressure of a globalised and medialised world. This series looks at public privateness and at the private publicity. It approaches fear in interiors and exteriors where it might pass unnoticed. This dossier contains twenty pairs of pictures. Each pair contrasts a webcam picture with a photograph. 1: Webcam pictures from one of the most busy places in the world, “Times Square” in New York City. Thirty 24 hour sequences taken from the same webcam were rescanned. Pictures were selected on the basis of the types of human actions and interactions. Only minimal digital alterations were made. 2: Photographs of hotel rooms taken in western Europe, North-Africa, and the U.S.A. Hotel photographs were illuminated by pocket lights during long time exposures. An approach which suggests uniqueness of rooms which are designed and maintained for commercial lodging. These hotel rooms appear as enigmatic shelters, lonesome nests, and secularised confessionals. They are simultaneously out of time and highly accelerated. The series emphasises contradictions in intentions, space, topography, subjects, speed, and aesthetics that provoke questions which recur, or hopefully even go beyond, those raised by the contemporary French philosophers Baudrillard and Virilio. The general acceleration in any cultural domain results in a loss of human reality (Baudrillard) or its substitution by a technological one (Virilio). Both Baudrillard and Virilio speculated about the consequences of a relative or an absolute reduction in the speed of light. A loss of visual communication would result from either a counterfactual slowing of light speed or a general acceleration of every process toward light speed.Dark areas in the photographs of hotel rooms simulate the partial collapse of the speed of light. Residuals of meanings emit lights that were integrated into a photograph. By contrast, the meanings are blurred by the speed in webcamsnapshots.
hennric jokeit
Zürich, 2007