TIME SLIP

TIME SLIP
Antoine Schmitt sept2008

On the screen or on a public display, a news ticker constantly displays scrolling textual news, but these news are conjugated at the future tense : "the NASDAQ will drop 4.3 points today", "A plane crash in Madrid will kill 153 people", "The Giants will crush the RedSocks 10 to 3" Apart from the tense of the verbs, all the news are completely true…

For the spectator, it is as if he was projected in the past of a few hours and that someone told him the future : feeling of going back in time. Or for someone who would not already know the news, it would be like if an oracle would tell her the future in advance : feeling of anxiety or of perverse full power. In all cases, it is a work that unsettles and generates uneasiness by introducing cracks in the flow of time. All the more because it uses graphic codes and display contexts usually attached to real news.

TIME SLIP is a visual artwork referring to philosophical questionings on destiny, its potential pre-written nature or its causal determinism, and in the end, a work on free will in a universe where time and its causality can slip. It confronts the spectator to the control of his own destiny. It is also a work on the motive energy of unpredictability and risk, more and more central in the contemporary world.

There is still an escape door for the spectator through the realization of the essential vanity of this system which fakes to know what will happen, but which in fact knows nothing. But this door is not easy to find.

TIME SLIP is based on a custom software that feeds from the official news agencies and changes the tense of selected news from past or present to future tense. TIME SLIP is always up to date. It is a programmed generative artwork.