CHRONOS XXl | 2017

video | 01 | 02 |


Chronos the god of time, per­ma­nently de­stroys and recre­ates. He who sym­bol­ises evanes­cence and re­turn, was the the­matic point of de­par­ture for the cre­ation of the ki­netic media in­stal­la­tion Chronos XXI. The piece is a ‘fin­ger ex­er­cise on an­tiq­uity’ and was cre­ated dur­ing a fel­low­ship at Villa Mas­simo in Rome.

A pen­du­lum con­tin­u­ously swings in front of a mon­i­tor. This mo­tion con­trols the slow syn­the­sis and de­struc­tion of de­pic­tions of Chronos on the mon­i­tor. Chronos ap­pears in var­i­ous in­ter­pre­ta­tions by painters of the late Re­nais­sance, Baroque and Clas­si­cism – as a man who dis­robes Ver­i­tas, as a per­former of volatile music, or dock­ing Cupid’s wings, or as chil­dren and crop eat­ing, a scythe and an hour glass car­ry­ing, beardy and winged old man.

In ad­di­tion to these his­tor­i­cal de­pic­tions newly gen­er­ated im­ages ap­pear. For that, a neu­ronal net­work was trained with his­tor­i­cal Chronos paint­ings. Its re­sult­ing ‘hallucina­tions’ of Chronos are fed into the con­tin­uos flow of im­ages.

Oc­ca­sion­ally, Chronos’ coun­ter­part Kairos who rep­re­sents the occation, a sin­gle mo­ment in time, slips in and in­ter­rupts the pic­to­r­ial med­i­ta­tion about the con­stant rhythm of ex­is­tence.