"Time Organ" explores the limits of time by reconnecting with our bodies.
Crédits photos : Chi-Hung Huang and Chun-Huang
Artists Chi-Hung Huang and Chun-Huang Lin created “Time Organ”, a virtual reality installation aiming to distance us from the conventional perception of time. Their digital artwork is part of the Art&VR Gallery of the 7th edition of Recto VRso festival whose theme is “Real time / Virtual time”.
What is time?
With “Time Organ”, Chi-Hung Huang and Chun-Huang Lin want to explore our perception of time. “Our artwork explores the detachment between the precise numerical concept of time and the sensory experience of the body”, they explain. As soon as modern tools made it possible, mankind organized time with numbers. Over the ages, time has become more and more precise, introducing attoseconds, a unit of time with eighteen decimal places. But how can we humanely perceive and feel an attosecond?
“Time Organ” is a way of exploring time outside of the organizational limits that mankind has built up. “The audience needs to reconnect with their personal sensations rather than the quantified notion of time”, the artists explain. According to them, it is essential to get rid of this artificial precision of time that makes it difficult to perceive, in order to regain our body’s rhythm. “We believe that the direct sensations of the body are the true essence of time”. How can we feel time outside of these conventions?
Artificial time vs bodily time
The artistic project “Time Organ” uses an installation and virtual content to help us perceive time through our body. The installation is an inspiration of the ancien water clocks which could indicate hours through the flow of a liquid. The installation is connected to the participant and tracks his/her body frequencies and transforms it into a tactile sensation in the form of drops of water falling onto the palm of his/her hand.
Inside the virtual reality headset, the participant receives visual and auditory stimuli that echo to his/her conventional perception of time. For example, an animation appears at the screen with the timer displayed reaches one second. Gradually, the experience synchronizes the time perceived through the sensory triggers received by the participant, with his/her own bodily frequencies which he/her feels with drops of water. The goal is to bring him/her back to a more natural perception of time, the one that we feel through our own bodily sensations.
“Time Organ” is the result of a collaboration between two artists: Chi-Hung Huang and Chun-Huang Lin. They are both students at the Graduate Institute of Art and Technology at National Tsing Hua University in China. They have won a total of 12 awards for their exploration of technology. They exhibited their projects in many international events, including Ars Electronica in 2023. “Time Organ” is part of the Art&VR Gallery during the next edition of Recto VRso Festival on April 11-14, 2024.
