this time we see, this time we feel

The sensation of time is an intrinsic part of any place, but it is a piece of a place that is impossible to take with you when you leave and almost equally as hard to explain to someone who has never been. When I think of what creates this divide, I see the events that we use to delineate our day and the subtlety with which we choose these events. These events are markers for the passage of time and yet the knowledge we have of what these events are for ourselves is sometimes very limited, if known at all.

Time passes when we become aware of the afternoon sun on our skin or pick our child up from school. Or maybe time passes with morning prayer or southern winds that we hear as they blossom in the evening.

What is interesting about these events is how they are shared and perceived by people living in the same place. My neighbor and I may share a segment of events that we delineate our day with, but there are entire spectrums of our lives that get encompassed in time in much different ways. These are due to our lifestyles not being entirely identical as well as the way we have positioned ourselves to perceive our surroundings, whether through beliefs or aesthetics.

“this time we see, this time we feel”, allow us to see time in its entirety as perceived in one place. Gathering information from webcams throughout Bangkok, the machine learns to mark video with what it perceives to be significant events occurring within the different feeds. The way it chooses to mark and differentiate significant events in each feed is self-learned and entirely based on the raw video data. The machine then divides the wall into drifting segments which it draws geometric representations showing the relationship of these events occurring across all the different video feeds. Given that each pass along the wall is drawn within a bounded segment of the wall, a single line from left to right (or right to left) can be seen as being analogous to a heartbeat monitor.

A final aspect of the piece is the roll of the viewer themselves in feedback with the piece. One of the video feeds comes from within the gallery itself. In this way the viewer is able to embed themselves in this mechanized process of capturing a complete sense of time across the many lives and nuances of a single place. And just as they have been woven into the machines sensation of time by entering the space, the machine itself has been woven into the viewers sense of time by their awareness and intent of having entered the space.