Time Machine

2011
3D animation, unfolded mirror-box, sound

A fox-like creature, projected into a partly unfolded mirrored-box, stutters an account of a visit to a distant future. Both the fox’s voice and narrative seem on the edge of collapse; words are repeated, languages interchange and sentences dissolve, as if its travel in time is equally a venturing into the very words that make up the narrative. Time machines produce surprising hues and tricks of the light, as they push the expressive and conceptual limits of language. This is the fast-forwarded cosmic vista that H.G. Wells’s protagonist in The Time Machine (1895) beholds when he mounts his machine of nickel, ivory and rock crystal, presses the start lever and departs for the future.

[Voiceover]: Did I leap ah-head? There is no dif-dif-ference between t-t-time and any of the other dimensions of s-space. And the mystery is not whether I have been in the fu-fu-future, b-but to believe what I actually found there. -Hhmn-Hhmn tids-tidsmaskine- So I t-travelled, stopping ever and again, in strides of a thousand years, -tid-t-tidsrejse-mærkelig fascination-, watching with a strange fascination the sun -merkur- grow larger and duller, and life-life slowly ebb away (…).

Installation views: Time Machine, Murray Guy, New York, 2011; You Imagine What You Desire, 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014; Unmuted, Der Offenbacher Kunstverein Mañana Bold, Frankfurt, 2020.