Touch Me Festival: It's about time!

The artistic and scientific works we are presenting at the exhibition consider the phenomenon of time from differing perspectives. Caramelo, Imafuku & Haramura, Petrič and Franke are concerned with natural phenomena, intervals and rhythms. Antonio Caramelo introduces us to an interactive world of clouds, enabling us to speed up or slow down the rhythms of nature at will. Ivana Franke permits us to recreate the experience of a mighty storm complete with thunder and lightning in a closed space. The focus of her work is on the intervals of the lightning flashes and the expectation of the thunder that is still to arrive.

Circadian rhythms are at the centre of two projects. One of them is the scientific research project of Michio Imafuku & Takashi Haramura who studied fruit flies, more than 700 generations of which lived in total darkness. The absence of the alternation of light and dark resulted in intriguing consequences for the flies, and this will be possible to see in an uncommonly long experiment that started back in 1954. In her project Solar Shifting, Špela Petrič tests out rats, subjecting them to the quantity of radiation to which to a great extent people are exposed when they use mobile technology, computers, laptops and being on the whole in closed artificially illuminated spaces during the day. How the rats (and people) cope with these circumstances, and whether the fruit flies from the dark are in the same time as those that live in the light, you will see at the show.

Within concern for biological rhythms, it is important to touch on the theme of death, as human, subjective moment of the end of time and the other side of immortality. Death is the subject of Gjino Šutić and Tanja Minarik who attempt with the help of scientific data obtained by various measurements to recreate the process of death and the dissolution of the body within the exhibition space. In the work of love of Marta de Menezes, an artist in collaboration with her scientist husband produced in the laboratory immortal cells with full genomic information from herself and from him. In their other work, de Menezes and Graça investigate bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Maria Manuela in her temporally founded installation Platonia takes up the issue of memory, the fragility of human perception as well as the impossibility of processing all the data that can be recorded and archived by various recording devices.

A great theme in the exhibition is the perception of time, with which several works deal. Ivan Ladislav Galeta in a great part of his oeuvre was absorbed by the theme of time. Time, in the sense of the sequence of past-present-future is an important aspect of narration inside the film. In as many as four of the Galeta works shown, the perception of time, or the space-time continuum, is shifted. And Galeta himself passionately explains his works in the documentary film by Gordana Brzović. Film time is the theme of the piece by Hrvoje Hiršl. Hiršl took as his model a film the specificity of which is editing that keeps the viewer in suspense thanks to the mingling of categories of past, present and future. In Hiršl’s version the film has a “correct” temporal sequence. Works by Vitar Drinković and Davor Sanvincenti also take up the perception of time. In his interactive device Drinković encourages the viewer to breathe deeply in order to set a clock in motion and listen to time, thus joining the incompatible – the clock that is an everyday source of stress and tension with a state of meditation. Sanvincenti with his audio-visual installation endeavours to achieve a slow-down at all physical levels, making use of luminous and sonic stimuli in rhythms or intervals taken from nature.

The mathematical and physical laws that hold true for the whole of the universe are also very complex and are not self-intelligible, nor are they usually visible. A project that deals with charged particles from the universe that have probably travelled here from some other galaxy even is Memory Steam of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitrij Gelfand. Microcosms and nanocosms are the area in which the performance of Robertina Šebjanič and Aleš Hieng – Zergon operates. The polar shift, i.e. the cyclical reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field that results in catastrophes, is the topic of Erich Berger’s interest, while Paul Prudence has concentrated on machines like the cyclotron and concepts like time machines, parallel universes and journeys through time.

At the end, one has to mention Pantaleone’s experience with the synchronisation of metronomes, which physics describes very well, but has not fully explained. If a lot of metronomes are on a movable base their arms will become harmonised thanks to the force of the bar striking the side. If the base is not in motion, this force is imperceptible.

The concept of time is one of those that we take for granted as a set characteristic of the world. It helps us to understand and systematise the process that we observe. But many physical, astrophysical and biological phenomena and theoretical concepts indicate that time is not a fixed and unchangeable category and the artists whom we have chosen for this exhibition use everyday and scientific phenomena that precisely bear this out.