Just recently I was in an exhibition by Philip Camens entitled Non Stop. The exhibitionist was my best friend teacher back when he was a graphic designer student in Luzern. The exhibits were stuffs that created or put together describing how modern civilization seems to be running out of time.
The exhibition flow starts with a big white room with floor that luminates and on which speakers are attached. The room is just cubic in shape and the wall was covered with some kind of white clothes or sound absorbent material.
It starts with the sound of the water, the leaves, the forest, the bird which gave some kind of relax feeling for about 8 minutes and the sound changes to the sound of ticking clock, beeping digital watches, answering machine, telephone ringing, car honking. The sounds then got louder and louder got mixed and intertwined to one another making such a fuzz when it then stops. Then the people exit the room and proceeded to the next exhibit.
The next exhibit was more like a lounge with four big screens showing people of different positions talking about their job in German, Swiss German. Although I did not understand a bit of what was being said and that I disturbed my friend once in a while to briefly translate what was said I quite get the irony and sarcasm that the exhibitionist tried to convey from it. Basically it attempted to show how people wasted such resources to build such state of the art mechanism to produce a final good which values did not add up to the better life for the consumer in terms of happiness and feeling of content.
The next one was more like a spacious room with computers each in which there was videos of motion which was captured in different pace. There was a video of an eagle catching its prey from the water which paced had been slowed down and there was a video with speed up pace showing a construction of skycrapers and changing seasons. It tried to show us how we perceive time and the change that goes with the running time. There are many things that could happen in a blink of an eye just as many can be witnessed in the course of our life time. For me this was the most memorable exhibit.
One level up, There was a bar and a dj awaiting with a set of black plates cased in covers of different color and arranged to form the word "Non Stop". The DJ asked us which of the story that was written in a card we would like to hear. Unfortunately all of the story was narrated in German.
One more level up, I was in a dark room with torch and papers on a table. These papers are to be used to write some of the anwers to the question that was asked in each row in the room where it has like six rows. The questions were:
What did you spend most of your time?
For what you wished you had more time for?
What stupid things you wasted your time for?
and etc
These papers are then hang
Saturday, May 15, 2010
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