Time Travel (2019)

Overview

Informed by engagement with urbanism, architecture, print and digital technology, Caline Aoun’s work often takes the shape of a considered experiment. She is interested in intervening in what she calls environmental noise—the general condition of media oversaturation and ubiquitous feedback loops that increasingly determine the nature of everyday life.

Commencing at sunset, Aoun’s Time Travel (2019) features four projectors spinning at 375 rotations per minute that show images at the equivalence of 25 frames per second, the timing necessary for digital moving images to appear visually fluid and continuous. Aoun playfully proposes to ‘leave the echo chamber’ through a kind of time travel, in which the spinning projectors use microwave internet technology to live-stream the artist’s surroundings in Beirut or the countryside where she lives onto the facades of a courtyard in Sharjah Art Foundation’s Al Mureijah Square. Throughout the duration of SB14, the camera location in Lebanon will change daily in relation to the artist’s movements, ultimately producing images that the artist describes as personal, encyclopaedic ‘shots of the day’. Surrounded by the whirlwind and flicker effect of the images, viewers can reflect not only on sensations of space-time collapse, the transmutation of distance into time through speed and the subsequent loss of matter or data but also on the instantaneous state of contemporary communication and the cumulative build-up of these forces on a body moving through space.