Time in the Time of Time
Time in the Time of Time is a durational, site-specific artwork that live-streams a view of the sunset each day as a reflection on time, attention, and perception. The work uses locally-run large-language-models to combine live observations of nature with hourly newsfeeds and a selected library of texts, generating a continuously evolving stream of text in the manner of concrete or cut-up poetry. Superimposed over the live urban landscape, the video stream is accompanied by synthetic, prerecorded, and daily-sourced online sonic fragments. Overall, the work explores a range of overlapping temporalities: presence and awareness, immediacy and delay, the everyday and the historical. Distributed live and asynchronously through online platforms, the work becomes an offering for reflective interpretation of our collective fragmentary, mediated, and screen-centric experiences of time.
Often operated without direct human intervention, the live-stream of Time in the Time of Time foregrounds automation as both material and condition. While the system runs autonomously, its generative corpus is deliberately curated, combining specific RSS feeds with selected political and philosophical texts as well as those concerned with trauma, care, and self-reflection. These contexts create a tension in the generated poetry between the public and personal, and the psychological and political, situating the work as part of broader cultural discourses while remaining tethered to lived interior experiences. The work anticipates its own platform-determined consumption; its poems are contained within a vertical frame even in the widescreen stream, and the software is automatically optimised to create a daily short-form clip of the pivotal poetic sunset moment. The long-form stream becomes part of an ever-expanding mass of unwatched archival data; a curated highlight competes in the infinite scroll.
The meanings that emerge in these viewings do so through subjective interpretation of the work’s duration and repetition, unpredictable patterns, and technological glitches, all of which mirror the systems that shape contemporary life. The core of the work remains intentionally subject to error, both digital and human – as latency, misalignment, and entropy emerge across its intersecting systems. By failing to achieve the seamlessness promised by digital platforms, the work exposes the fragility beneath screen experiences, asking how different temporal registers of reflection and agency might persist within an attention economy optimised for speed, extraction, and endless content.
