Minutes From Now
MINUTES FROM NOW
The three-channel video installation “Minutes from Now” is inspired by a fictive-ethnographic approach (Henri Michaux) and shifts into view space-time phenomena (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) in connection with socio-political repercussions of and on the planet’s ecology in the early twenty-first century. Stunning footage of very different places and landscapes in the world are poetically edited together and condensed to form a distinct time-scape.
Intense polyrhytmic sound textures, disturbing scraps of conversation, and meaningful visual sequences deliberately dissolve common time constructions and open insight into the plural time-worlds of our „Anthropocene“ – or even an „Anthropochronos“ – a continuum, which is shaped by human activities of permanent renewal, construction and deconstruction, migration and hypermobility, acceleration and raging standstill, and their immanent fields of friction.
The title “Minutes from Now” refers, on the one hand, to the apparent im/measurability of time, and on the other hand to the fragmentary notes and protocol-like moments that are captured, which are meticulously composed together in the video installation.
MinutesFromNow_Trailer from Simona Koch on Vimeo.
IDEA
The art project by Nikolaus Gansterer and Simona Koch takes as starting point, a several-month research journey from Vienna to Tokyo — via eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and China — with the goal of gathering film recordings during the trip in order to develop a “living screenplay of the moment.” During subsequent research travels through Cuba, India, Iceland, and Egypt, further essential film material was captured.
Processes of permanent change, movements of migration and a progressing globalization were omnipresent on these intense trips — with tours through megacities, the rural areas located between them, extremely diverse zones of growth and decline, and deserts and non-sites. Particularly impressive, however, was an emerging awareness of phenomena of temporality, which became the main source of inspiration for the video installation “Minutes from Now.”
Individual realities and their associated experiences of time are shaped differently depending on where a human is situated, and his/her personal, political, and cultural embossment. For time eternal, cities — agglomerations of experiences and developmental sites of innovations — have thus generated different speeds and temporal horizons than towns. The experience of permanently changing time zones of acceleration and deceleration has become the twenty-first century’s fundamental constant – as well as – what Niklas Luhmann calls “guiding difference” (Leitdifferenz).
INSTALLATION
In the installation of the film material, complex phenomena of temporality (concurrence, concomitance, simultanity, a-/synchronicity, delay and decay) are translated as follows:
a) The footage is edited in a diagrammatic way: hundreds of hours of film material were rhytmically organized and re-composed to fragile micro-moments between image, sound and word.
b) On three projection screens situated towards one another in a star-shape, there are always two films screened next to one another. One of the two neighboring films is always mirror-inverted, meaning that the pictorial material thus enters into a new referential relationship with the other neighboring film. The viewers are invited to move from niche to niche. Thus situations seem different when one adopts a different position as observer — or rather, an observed situation develops further — even when you move on yourself.
Title: „Minutes from Now“
Artists: Nikolaus Gansterer and Simona Koch
Year: 2016
Medium: 3-channel HD-video installation
Duration: 3 x 17 minutes
Dimensions: approx. 8 x 8 x 2 meter
Sound/composition: Martin Siewert and Martin Brandlmayr.
Voices: Nikolaus Gansterer, Anat Stainberg, Hui Ye, Walid Shaar.
Generously supported by Bundeskanzleramt, Austria and via residencies funded by Goethe Institute, Germany