Chronopolis focuses on our collective fascination with the mechanisms and meanings of time. By intertwining notions of time, urbanism and electronic media, we are asking whether the mechanical clock, as interface and representation of time, still makes sense in our globalized, accelerated and unstable present.

NOTIONS ADDRESSED IN CHRONOPOLIS

• currencies vs history
• human body vs automation
• mass production vs obsolescence
• decay vs infinity
• immediacy & duration
• duration & mobility
• roadways as narrative
• cities as clocks
• time as architecture

FORMAT: The installation takes the form of a 10 x 10 meter square floor-projected interface that visitors can walk through. The computer generated interface displays days, hours and minutes/seconds grids over which four animated pictograms representing the elements of seconds, minutes, hours and days, travel in real time. Each pictogram moves at a specific speed, determined by the real time system clock of the computer, leaving a trail of dots behind. The pictograms also symbolize flows of currency, goods, people and decay. As visitors step onto the surface of the image, they enter into an immersive space. Parabolic speakers, which focus sound into extremely localized areas, aurally project a multichannel sonic landscape over the interface. Seconds, minutes, hours and days are registered as individual musical and sonic events, enveloping the visitors as they walk across the surface of the projection. As visitors over the course of the exhibition "populate" Chronopolis, the time grids and sonic landscape responds and mutates to produce a single common grid--a new visual and aural time structure which appears to accelerate and decelerate based on human presence.