Timeslot project log

Timeslot project log:

We asked people to record what they were naturally doing between 20:20 and 20:23, after gathering around twenty videos we discovered it was an in between time, nothing significant was happening, and most were relaxing and ending their days. 

To prove this theory, we tried to guess when we felt it was 20:20 and during this experiment, we all lost track of time. This was due to us being indoors, under artificial light, relaxing and winding down at the end of our days. We felt that this time could easily pass you by, a feeling of transience we wanted to evoke in our outcome. 

Upon further research, we visited Ikea and saw it created a strange sort of time warp. This was due to the artificial lighting, staged environments and the large-scale structure of the shop, leaving us all disoriented. We realised that if we experienced the area without sound, it would greatly change the atmosphere and therefore saw its importance in contextualising the time. 

We initially attempted to stage an environment, using a child’s blanket fort as a vessel to present this. We wanted to create this sense of losing track of time and how children perceive it differently to adults. However, we abandoned this idea, as it wasn’t based on a universal truth, as we were assuming, for the context of our project, that a child’s bedtime is always 20:20. 

So, to expand our research, we found that supermarkets reduce food between 7 and 9pm.  we visited a wide range of different supermarkets available to us and gathered photos of all the reductions, over three to four consecutive days. This was an attempt to use a product truth, however, we felt our previous idea was the most honest way of presenting 20:20, as the videos of people were real and undirected. Therefore, we dropped reduced foods and went back to our video research. 

I layered up the videos, making a collage of all the 3-minute videos playing simultaneously with differing opacitys and speeds. Equally, was the importance of sound, we used the audio from our collected videos. Rainna pointed out that the ambient noise merged with hectic sounds, created a disassociation for the viewer, as the noises weren’t inherently recognisable but formed an atmosphere in the space. The sound weaves in and out and mirrors the actions being seen in the video projection. 

We chose the basement as our space, as we wanted an area that felt isolated and separate from the review room, to put our audience in an appropriate mindset. We want the environment to be controlled, quiet and dark, only allowing eight people in at a time so there’s a chance to fully experience the space whilst also considering the numbers of the class.  

Dante’s inferno describes limbo as a circle, which is why we wanted our audience to walk around the double-sided board three times. The medium of projection plays tribute to the artificial light we saw in our research, and the height of the film, allows the audience to see themselves in the space. If we could, we would establish an environment where only one person would experience this environment in solitude.