Time Machine
2005

Originally commissioned by Artpace, San Antonio, Texas.

Video installation. Wooden table 150 x 300 x 75 cm. 5 dvds, 5 tv sets, 5 dvd players, 5 pair of speakers.

[play video]

A wooden table contains five TV monitors that are visible through small windows. Each monitor reproduces a different loop made from the few seconds when the words THE END appear at the end of five American films from the 1940's. These loops can not all be seen at once due to their position in the table they. Five sound loops, corresponding to the chosen fragments, accompany the images. The sound loops play simultaneously, but as the length of every fragment is different, the resulting composition is always changing. As the listener moves around the table, the additional variations according to his or her position make it impossible to ever reproduce the same fragment of sound.

TIME MACHINE is not a machine to travel in time; it is a machine that produces a present time from films that never quite die, or that are permanently dying.