Prelude to another time.
Onsite (okno) and Online 25-26-27 April 2010.
Soon OKNO, ESC and COL-ME will start a 2-year long project called Time Inventors’ Kabinet. The idea is to rethink the way we are perceiving time, relate it to ecological concepts, and see what the impact could be on creating media art works. For more information, please read below the “Introduction to the “Time Inventors’ Kabinet” [TIK]“.
The online sessions on 25-26-27 April are a starting point. These days, we will try to work out some ideas, using simple tools like a wiki and a chat server. We will try to generate some basic textual material together for developing collaborative works based on the idea of Wind Clocks, ecology and time. For more information: http://timeinventorskabinet.org/wiki/doku.php
Each session introduces a couple of subjects we can discuss and write out together. Just to see what the creative interests could be and to link them to relevant existing resources and documentation. We hope to come to already some preliminary ideas, that can be further developed within the future TIK Project workshops.
Participation is possible either from OKNO’s space in Brussels (see http://okno.be/node/194), from home, or anywhere else with internet access. We encourage not to work alone, but to invite other interested artists as to encourage collective creativity.
The program wants to:
a. start a discussion, based on the collected resources and ideas
b. collection creative approaches towards these shared resources and ideas
c. form some small groups of people working the coming months on some works together, if possible
The schedule:
Sunday 25 April = Painting a background
1 [3pm] TIK Project content overview, building windclocks and other ideas
2 [7pm] Materials for an ecological media art: ecology, art and nature, sciences
(from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, physics, biology, astronomy, …)
Monday 26 April = Writing art
1 [3pm] Ideas about time and its historical/natural development
2 [7pm] Creative ideas by the participating artists, and about how to continue together
Tuesday 27 April = TIK starter…
1 [3pm] Practical calendar and ideas first 3-mester, overview project activities
2 [7pm] Discussion with the project partners and participating artists
For more information, check out http://timeinventorskabinet.org/wiki/doku.php
Introduction to the “Time Inventors’ Kabinet” [TIK].
The project TIK (Time Inventors’ Kabinet) will take place over 2 years, as a collaborative action by 3 core partners(OKNO in Brussels, COL-ME in Bratislava and ESC in Graz) and numerous other contributors. We will organize a distributed research and creation lab, with ongoing workshop points in each partner region, taking an ecological approach(in the etymological sense of the term : a study approach taking into account relations of organisms to one another and to their physical environment and overall context) to observing patterns in time and time control systems.
Our shared work will be an investigation into time relations within biological and circumstantial ecologies, through the lens of system aesthetics. Using media technology and electronics as research tools in our shared laboratories, we will collect data from various ecosystems over a period of time. The artistic output of this data collection process will be the creation of electronic interfaces that will then be used to reinterpret the data with goal of exploring time related poetics such as synchronicity and (ir)regularity through electronics, and of developing a common language about time.
We will use the creative tools we build to generate new audio and visual artworks and mediate a creative discourse on Eco Time. We will do this by hosting a series of workshops, art radio sessions, public presentations, conferences and exhibitions, finalized by a publicly available process archive of all of findings and results of the TIK project and a critical publication, as a record and guide to ‘re-inventing ecological time’.
A primary metaphor for our approach with this project is an ‘horloge a vent’(wind clock), an imaginary time keeping device regulated by the irregular movement of the wind. In practice, the windclock can be viewed as an organism that grab inputs from the diverse flows of energy around it and transform them into variable rythms to synchronise with. As it is, it can be driven by the wind, or by any other stream.
Through this project we seek to explore new approaches to experiencing time and to use this approach to research the possibilities for collaboration and synchronicity that may be found when we take on different time systems. We will explore the outcome of giving-over control of time to natural and environmental processes, algorithms.

