Tempus Vitae
Time is of the Essence. The Essence is Time.
produced by: Luis Rubim
Tempus Vitae - Time is of the Essence. The Essence is Time. Time is Life and Life is Time.
I have always been interested in the physics of time and time as a constant. Indeed, if we look around us, all matter and life is dependent on time. We tend to look at other things as essential to life and energy, but without time, we would not be, neither would the Universe. Many thinkers would argue that the very essence of life is time. The old adage “Time is of the essence” is often casually used in conversation, but time is so much of the essence that the expression is in fact a contractual term in American and English law. Time is a “commodity” that is traded and exchanged for gain or profit. Some even reduce their sleeping time to make the most out of this “commodity”. We are obsessed with time. We build relationships over time and every single life experience represents a snippet of time. We often think about “time-saving”,”time-consuming”, “aging” and reversing it, eternity and eternal youth, but time is an inevitability, in that we think about time as a forward moving and somewhat consuming factor. It has since time immemorial “consumed” the minds of thinkers, from philosophers to physicists, from debates on reductionism, eternalism, consciousness to theories of time, time travel and the perceived infinity of the Universe and what it entails. Nevertheless, time as we perceive it, is nothing but a construct of our own. The subjectivity of time is often noted in Nature. Every cell, plant, animal, ecosystem have their own biological clock. Time runs everything however, not completely without glitch, which are often taken as luck or chance. Some physicists argue that with time even chance will be proven not to be such and in fact a question of time. As Man continues to shed many of his universalist preconceived notions, time continues to be one of the most elusive ones, although it rules the Universe.
My work was inspired initially by Oleg Pashkovskiy’s Sine Wave Circles, in that it was a contained, enclosed system in which sinewaves ran around a circle, with only their speed controlled by a time value. I wanted to represent the ephemeral nature of this constant that pervades everything, within an enclosed system and see what time could do to other constants in the enclosed system. As such, a certain degree of experimentation was required, like some of my personal work in other mediums and my interest in glitch art. The iterations and mutations in the piece were all made to work with time controlled variables, with the intention of making it gain an almost “heartbeat” , molecular like character, as to represent life and its dependence on time. However, time is also to an extent unpredictable, resulting in an occasional glitch like character in the piece and at times surprising with clearly defined constructs. The helix like structures were intended to represent separate strands of DNA, representing the evolution of Man, again ruled by time and a somewhat deconstructing of his essence into the future in the post modern and post human world. The next stage of the piece was left to time itself to control. The representations of Man at this stage intend to bring upon the question of time and Man’s preconceptions of it, his attempts to control it while being under its control.
References:
Oleg Pashkovsky – Creative Technologist
http://www.pshkvsky.com/
Leonardo DaVinci
"Vitruvian Man", image.
