“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
–Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse-Five”
My fascination with non-linear Time began around 2002, when I was 16 years old. This was the year I first read “Slaughterhouse-Five,” a special assignment from my favorite English teacher – a person who saw me for the interdimensional weirdo that I was, and guided me toward that which would tickle my curious mind.
This was also the year that I began my photography practice in earnest, having acquired a Lomo LC-A at a local closeout store. I became enmeshed in the online community around the cult camera – a rarity in the pre-social media era – finding the connection and feedback around my work to be powerful fuel in my desire to experiment with the waning medium of film.
I was “@thesarahshow” then as I am now, as I have been since I came up with the screenname as a 9-year-old on AIM. Simplistic though it may be, I treasure this continuity – my little hieroglyph carries through each new unfolding era of digital exploration.
I have begun to view my online activities as a sort of weaving with Time. Our moments here get preserved. They are never gone; instead, the Past swims around us, barely distinguishable from the Present. And, through our state of constant connection with one another and the zeitgeist, we receive flashes of the Future. Electric signals pulse through the network and into our nervous systems, delivering encoded messages of what’s to come.
Like the Tralfamadorians of Vonnegut’s lore, we see the different moments laid out like a mountain range, no longer a string of pearls – even if we feel afraid, and as of yet unsure how to interpret such revelations.
My new series Temporale was inspired by this non-linear experience of Time when moving between the physical and virtual worlds of the early 21st century.
I wanted to return to my roots in experimental photography, as that practice emerged synchronously with my interest in altered temporality. And so, I devised a concept and a process that would allow me to capture multiple timelines of the same moving object into a single still image.
These works begin with “seed” videos of luminous fabrics and materials rotating through space. This is a nod both to the origins of computing as developed through the Jacquard Loom, as well as a desire to work with highly organic forms that shift depending on their viewpoint and light source.
I created these videos through a dual process. First, I filmed physical objects in the Light Witch Lab of my studio.
Then, I created animations of virtual objects with similar properties and motion through a combination of Stable Diffusion and After Effects.
These “origin” properties are split 50/50 within the series. My intention with this is to blur the line between the material and the incorporeal.
At this stage, the seeds get fed through a series of time displacements. After a round of digital time manipulations, I bring the videos into the analog ecosystem of my video rig.
Here is where I begin to craft the final works with my hands extended through circuits. I herd my seeds through devices which allow me to de-synchronize the video frames in a rhythmic, musical fashion. I simultaneously capture these controlled glitches off my vintage CRT screen through a digital slit-scan, recording one line of pixels at a time. This registers myriad timelines of the same moving object into a single still image.
As I sit in command of the rig, I call upon both my fluency with analog video and my experience with playing the drums, synthesizing hand and eye into glorious visual music.
I see this as my contribution to “a field whose special dimension is time. An art which is temporal, as music itself; being, that is, spatio-temporal. An art whose time has come because of computer technology and an art which could not exist before the computer,” in the words of the artist John Whitney. (Whitney, John. "Computational Periodics." Artist and Computer, edited by Ruth Leavitt, Harmony Press, 1976, pp. 42-51.)
(Interestingly, I found this essay after I had already completed the series while researching Whitney, who first inspired my desire to work in time-based media.)
Created in a 16:9 aspect ratio, these works were crafted with fluidity in mind. As such, they may be displayed vertically, horizontally or even cropped at the viewer’s preference. Displays have been a pain point in the widespread embrace of digital art, and I wanted to create work that was impossible to display improperly.
Temporale is in an edition of 1/1/250 – my first larger-scale series of this type, released on the fourth anniversary of the first artwork I minted on the blockchain. I have witnessed a culture emerge, crest, recede and reset in that time. I continue to find the blockchain to be, at its core, an intriguing and useful tool for the Long Now – Even if its co-option by hypercapitalists and grifters is both demoralizing and frustratingly par for course in society-as-we-know-it.
I can speak only to my small part in the vastness of things. It is still remarkable to be able to edition digital artwork in its native format with an immutable, decentralized timestamp and provenance. I stand by my advocacy in this regard, even as the dance I do becomes increasingly complicated.
I present these tapestries of Time with the thrust of my whole heart and human sensuality, channeled through the new tools we take up and the old webs we weave.
EDITION INFO
Temporale is an edition of 1/1/250, meaning it comprises 250 unique works within a single series. It was minted on a sovereign contract on April 3, 2023 and distributed the following day to all holders of SuperRare’s RarePass.
The editions will, therefore, be solely available on the secondary market. Links provided below. I ask that all collectors honor the 10% artist royalty in good faith as agreed upon in the smart contract, regardless of the marketplace.