The (quick) Time Machine (2003) is a re-presentation of the 1960 film adaptation of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. The film was separated into every one of its 'hard' edits, which were then made into video loops. Each loop was subsequently sequenced according to the original storyline across a 40-block grid, read left to right, top to bottom. At any given moment the audio is in sync with one of the grid spaces, until that space starts looping, at which point the adjacent right block begins, with the audio syncing to it. When the grid fills up the process starts over in the top left corner. The two-channel projection, through its structure of exactly 1000 edits over the 103 minutes length of the original film, ends in the bottom right hand corner. What at first looks like a clutter of incoherent video loops soon begins to challenge our perceptive apparatus. Quickly becoming aware that all loops are part of the same original source an immediate instinct tries to bring logic into what is seen and heard until finally one of the grids can be hooked up with the soundtrack. Whether consciously or not the mind cannot but run through these steps and, regardless of how quickly this happens, one can experience very precisely how our mind is trained to master a blurred visual impression by analyzing the sound image relation. While the perceptive apparatus is seeking for possible points of reference it is held up in an endlessly looping time space, a reflux that promises no progress although it displays all its components at once. Like on a wooden stick floating in a river the eyes stay fixed on that one moment where sight, sound and memory appear to be connected.
Nate Harrison, lives and works in New York