Taking Time — A View from the Window at Silva Bay Store
by Chris Welsby
This art installation uses digital technology to slow down the process of image recording in order to register the slow, long term, transformations of the natural world. In this piece, the repetitive cycle of the tides, the alternation of night and day, and the passing seasons, take the place of, the more familiar human experience, of breath, metabolism and heart rate. Human activity is seen, in passing, and only then, if at all, against the larger backdrop of planetary time.
A small, high-resolution web cam will be located in the Silva Bay store and coffee station on the south end of Gabriola Island. The view outside the window, will be relayed live via a computer, to a wall mounted monitor display.
Specially written computer soft ware, will change the on-screen image, one pixel at a time. The speed at which the image is updated is infinitely variable, and could take minutes, hours or even years for every pixel to change. Like the brush strokes in an impressionist painting, each pixel will represent a single passing moment but here the similarity ends.
To the computer, time passing is just a series of zeros and ones, line after line after line of them stretching all the way to infinity. The machine is immortal, it cares nothing for our feeble innumerate brains. But to our human perceptions, trapped by the finite beating of the heart, the pixels flickering on the monitor screen, are like so many tiny windows reflecting the light of each passing moment. They are strangely beautiful in their other worldly way. Little bursts of phosphorescent light shimmering on the surface of the screen like mysterious envoys from the unknowable world of machines.
The view of Silva Bay is real enough, but the artwork is neither a still photograph, a movie or a video but a third technology dedicated to slowing time down. The piece has no fixed duration yet, at any given moment, it contains an accurate trace of time present as well as time past. In this piece, there is no recorded image, the work can never be finished and what you will see on the monitor screen will remain as ephemeral as the light which dances on the waters of Silva Bay.
Opening: Friday, August 22nd, 1:30 pm
Location: Village Foods South
Chris Welsby
Chris Welsby has been making and exhibiting work since 1969. His films and film/video installations have been exhibited internationally, at several major galleries. He writes:
"In my single screen films and single channel videos the mechanics of film and video interact with the landscape in such a way that elemental processes—such as changes in light, the rise and fall of the tide or changes in wind direction—are given the space and time to participate in the process of representation. The resulting sequences of images make it possible to envisage a relationship between technology and nature based on principles other than exploitation and domination.”
