(ticking)
- One of the things that the artists do
is take things we know but can't see
and make them visible.
(ticking)
So the idea of time,
which is this completely vague, invisible concept,
there are ways of making it very visible--
the film that runs forwards or backwards
so you're aware of time running backwards,
and other ways of materializing time.
Of fracturing, of having two images
which are in sync but gradually get out of sync.
As soon as one knew there was an absolute number
for the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second,
then suddenly, time becomes distant.
And it also threw up ideas
of all the images of everything that had happened on earth
expanding out from earth, and it travels forever
unless it gets swallowed by a black hole,
which is the scientific postulate
about the nature of the cosmos,
but it's also a poetic description
of what it is to have a grave and a burial.
So all these other things which are not about science,
which are about human emotions or states of being,
very quickly came from the science outwards.
Time can run backwards.
You can smash the vase and reconstruct it perfectly.
And questions of regret,
of things you wish you could undo, to unsay, to unsave,
to not send the email to the wrong person.
We've discovered, I think, that we can put
very contradictory kinds of languages
right in amongst each other
and we will still make sense of it.
For this, I wanted both the times
to be separate images, connected but not identical,
and sometimes for them to be sewn together in rough collage
and working together with machines inside of the space.
The breathing machine on the one hand
is a set of human lungs.
It's kind of the rhythm section of the whole piece.
You could also describe the human being as a clock.
So there's a way in which one can think of a body
as something that's been wound up at birth
and it will keep ticking
until it winds down at the end of its allotted year.
The megaphones are interesting.
They're both a formal element
and they make a very simple way of directing sounds.
There's a general soundscape of the whole piece,
but if you sit under the megaphones
within their angle of sound,
you can hear the spoken text very clearly.
So you can either choose to listen to the lecture...
- We are all constantly broadcasting ourselves...
- Or you can let the lecture be a distant sound
somewhere else in the room.
- ...throughout the universe.
- I think what you want anyone to take away from it
is the possibility of making things like this.
You can see it's quite crudely hand-made.
We gave ourselves two days to do the film
of the blowing up of the meridian,
so we would have two hours to draw the backdrop,
so me and other people
working and saying, "We need a globe,
we need to make a time bomb out of cardboard,"
and then we'd have an hour to film the sequence.
Then we'd paint over the set
and with the same pieces of cardboard draw the next set.
There's no great, deep theory of time in the piece.
It's a celebration of making
against the effect of our eventual disappearance.
That's the refusal of time.
We're not going to escape our journey to the black hole
at the end, however fast we dance and run away.
But the dance and the run is still what it's all about.