The speed of Time has kept accelerating, (Paul Virilio).

  Time is without doubt the most essential element in the universe. Everything that happens only happens because we measure it against the yardstick of time. It is our awareness of time, our ability to perceive its significance in relation to our lives that lies at the heart of our human condition. As our understanding of nature has continuously altered throughout history, so the very concept of time has undergone many changes. A 'second' must have meant a very different thing to Aristoteles compared to what it means to us today. Unless an objective comparison can be made, a second remains an abstract and utterly relative idea, irrelevant perhaps to the classical mind, while it may be tangible to us now.

It is obvious that our understanding of time is closely linked to the technological developments that allow us to quantify time in ever smaller (or larger) units and to organize our sense of reality around it.

But time is not merely a relative physical entity, measured on an atomic clock. It can be any number of things. Once we speak to an astronomer, a psychologist, a biologist, a historian, or to the man running to catch his train, the gamut of possibilities for perceiving timeframes opens up.

From the perspective of the individual, time is a highly subjective experience. And, as such, it has always been at the centre of the artist's fascination. Whether it was in the stretched time of tragedy, in the allegorical allusion to it in painting, or in musical form, by giving shape to its measurement, through the ages artists have reflected upon the nature of time.

But to make use of time itself as a tool for artistic expression may arguably have begun with the invention of the printing press. A writer or a poet was now able to share his imagination with the reader on a large scale. This reader would spend a certain amount of time, determined and moulded by the artist. He would enter into a reality that only comes into existence through the intermediary device of the book. Seen from this angle, the technology of printing was the benchmark invention that started a whole process.

It led us into the world of contemporary dynamic media, such as film, video and computing, and their artistic use as a timebased medium for expression.

IMAGO
In my previous exhibition, IMAGO, findesiècle in Dutch Contemporary Art, some very clear examples illustrated the fascinating contributions that time based arts have made to the visual arts.
Ricardo Füglistahler's PANTA RHEI (Everything Flows), showed slowly passing clouds on two small monitors, built into an archaic lead sculpture, while every second a drop of water fell from a funnel onto a granite block. A hole in the stone, apparently caused by the dripping water, underlined the power of time.
In POMPE, Boris Gerrets used the allusion to the ancient city to create a metaphor for frozen time. On a twoscreen animation video, he then reconstructed the place as a mental space in which reality only interferes as death. At the supreme moment of the narrative, our attention was violently drawn away from the screen to two death masks on the wall, which we were not able to see before.
Bert Schutter's MILL x MOLEN showed a sculpture, consisting of a metal frame containing twelve video monitors in the shape of a Dutch windmill. On the screens, the sails of the mill flashed by, displaying the contrast between static form and dynamic content.
But, without any doubt, the most lucid and poetic, illustration of an artist using time as plastic material was Bill Spinhoven's ALBERT'S ARK. On top of a sculpture, resembling both a medieval sundial and a futuristic spaceship, a small video camera was mounted. On a video monitor hidden in the sculpture, the spectator saw his own image, distorted by means of a computer device, designed by the artist himself, which he called The Time Stretcher. This instrument, which stretched the space between the 625 lines that make up a (PAL)video image, caused a time difference of roughly three seconds between the top and the bottom of each image. In this manner, the viewer was confronted with his own, gradually delayed, image and movement. Thus, Spinhoven illustrated, rather elegantly, Einstein's Theory of Relativity: bending time causes the deformation of the other 3 dimensions.

THE SECOND
Seven years after the IMAGO exhibition, I have seized the opportunity to take a second look at the development of contemporary artists who express their ideas through technological media. THE SECOND consists of 17 timebased sculptures, created by 12, often young, media artists. Once more we are confronted with a multitude of highly original interpretations of and reflections on the nature of time and the technologies that make use of it.

As a central installation, in the exhibition there is Peter Bogers' HEAVEN. In this work, time is referred to as absence. As a space can be defined either by what we do or do not find in it, Bogers' work is about a subtraction of time elements that add up to a tangible experience. In a small, completely empty, whitewashed, 3room apartment, we encounter the remnants of the life that was previously led in this house. On 17 small blackandwhite monitors, we catch 17 glimpses (lasting one second each) of various, haphazard, fragments of movement. Together, they display domestic life: a door is moving in the draught, a cat snores in front of an absent heater, a baby is at its mother's breast, curtains move in the wind, a coffee cup is being stirred, a hand caresses a body and, as an explanation of the reason why the needle got stuck on the gramophone record, a fragment of a TV image, registered in a studio during the Kobe earthquake.
Bogers' domestic microcosm continues in his work RETORICA. In this case the subject is the interaction between father and child. Short moments of communication between him and his son are sampled and played back in such a manner that they create a reversal of roles. Bogers' manipulation of image and sound reveals an unsuspected potential.
Bogers magnifies a hidden dimension: another of his very personal media sculptures, SACRIFICE, display, on a large photo, a complicated setup in stark contrasts with a tiny little 2"x3" image in a glass box that is the core of the work. Through the magnifying glass we see only the artist's mouth drinking the water of the very bathtub in which he is lying, or is he perhaps drowning? Events that happen cannot be undone.
Perhaps the catastrophic view which Bogers displays in HEAVEN is appeased in BOREALIS by Steina Vasulka. For what is selfevident to man, may not be so once we consider the thought within the perspective of the larger forces that govern nature. Their cyclical character strips time of its direction. BOREALIS consists of 4 vertically placed projection screens, on which, bymeans of a construction of 2 video projectors and 2 sets of mirrors, 4 images are displayed. The images show seascapes, filmed by the artist in Iceland, her country of origin. The movement of the water, however, alternates between forward and backward. The manipulation brings to mind the idea of eternity, in which time is no more than an endless field of flowing matter.

Another confusion of conflicting time/reality frames is created by the irony of Bert Schutter's LES BAIGNEUSES. The work alludes to the famous painting by Renoir.
Entering the space, the visitor is again confronted with the sound of splashing water and giggling girls. As he walks in the direction of the source of these sounds, he must go through the curved corridor that leads to the projection screen. There, he is detected before he ever reaches the screen. A sensor then tells the girls to flee from the water, and as the spectator arrives at the screen, only the images of an empty pond remain for him to see. This conceptual work is a playful reversal of Schroedinger's Quantum Mechanical Paradigm. Events only exist as long as they can be observed. Here, the event is prevented from being observed. Ultimate beauty remains fiction unless we create it within ourselves!

While in this work the spectator never gets to see the work, in Bill Spinhoven's I/EYE, he never escapes its gaze.
This seemingly simple piece has become an icon of interactive art.
The artist's eye fills the screen and follows every movement that takes place in front of it. For the first time since Altamira, art takes revenge for being looked at. As it looks back,we are being caught in the vicious circle of identity. In another of Spinhoven's works, THE LOGIC OF LIFE, he elaborates on the psychological confusion caused by looking but not knowing whatwe are actually looking at. A huge machine, remotely resembling a film projector, is running smoothly at high speed. As soon as the light in the space is reduced, the machine remains lit by a number of computercontrolled LEDs that vary in frequency. The machine appears to run in a seemingly illogical manner. Various times and speeds run amok, backwards and forwards apparently just for the purpose of projecting images of the artist attempting to fly. His fascination for mechanics is shared by Fiona Tan.
Her piece, WITNESS, consists of a mechanical piece of clockwork in which the weights have been replaced by 5 monitors of various dimensions, each representing a time element: a day, an hour, a minute, a second and a frame (1/25th of a second).
Images are displayed on the monitors, which illustrate these particular time elements, underlining the subjectivity of time. During the day, these weights gradually lower until, at the end of the day, they will have to be hoisted up again. Her use of the metaphor of the clock brings to mind the allegorical representations in which the hourglass used to indicate the fate of the flesh. This aspect comes into view in another of her works, ATLAS OF THE INTERIOR.
While browsing through the Internet, she came across the images of 1700 deepfrozen slices of a human body. It appeared to be the body of the murderer Joseph Jernigan, who, on being sentenced to death, had donated his body to medical science. In this installation, the visitor is requested to wear one of the white coats available. The body is reconstructed on two monitors, while images of the slices are projected onto the visitor's white coat. Reflective texts, spoken by the artist, accompany the confrontation with this peculiar case of recycling.

THE SKIPPING MIND by Bea de Visser is also a work that attempts to reconstruct, or rather reanimat, a reality that belongs to the past. The installation consists of two parts. Part one is a combination of 25 painted portraits. The portraits are painted after a series of photos of an anonymous woman which Visser found in an old book in a market in Prague. After having brought these faces onto the canvas, de Visser digitized the paintings and used a 'morphing' programme to put the image into motion. The result is shown in the adjacent space where a projected image revives someone who has longsince disappeared. You can sense her endearing and nostalgic connection with this anonymous person whose virtual face vacillates between reality and fiction. It is almost as if time has a face.

FACE SHOPPING by A.P. Komen shows a very different rendering of the human face. On four, 2x3 meter, adjacent projection screens, four closeups of young women are shown. Each of the girls has a nervous 'tic'. As these images are looping in fragments of a few seconds, these 'tics' become obsessive.They are the many 'forgotten moments' of uncon scious behaviour that reveal true emotional content.

The REANIMATIONS of Christiaan Zwanikken are also erratically emotional, be it in a very different way. In a fivepart installation, the remains of birds and other animals are reanimated using microprocessors. The combination of the evidentlypresent technology and the animal skulls, bones and feathers, causes an ambiguous effect. Hilarious, but also rather chilling. For the objects really seem to come back to life with a great deal of movement and noise.

It is Kees Aafjes who most wittingly explores our problematic relationship with (art)objects. As Aafjes sees it; an artist has to call for attention and appreciation during all his whole life in order to survive. To accentuate the irony of his view, the wingless creature in FOUNDLING mumbles: 'Please, touch me', in a mixture of Spanish and Dutch. Whenever a passerby responds to this request, the insect proclaims his satisfaction in various degrees, to an almost organic level.
His CREDIT ART is a pastiche of a credit card machine. The visitor is invited to enter his card in order to obtain a work of art. On a small screen on the side of the machine, the buyer is then confronted with the demolition of his 'flexible friend'.

Contemporary life has its pitfalls for the art viewer, but MARACAÏBO, ships that pass in the night by Pieter Baan Müller is an installation in the best traditions of 20th century Dutch constructivist painting. 3 identical computer monitors are placed on pedestals. The left and right monitor show only a monochrome rectangle, the left red, the starboard light of a vessel, the right green, portside. On the central monitor, a black (bottom) and grey (top) horizontal rectangle represent, respectively, the ocean and the sky, with the horizon separating the two in the centre. The image is moving up and down, suggesting the rolling movement of the sea. From time to time, the screen in the centre is blanked by flashes from the lighthouse at Maracaïbo. At random, the centre screen changes radically and is filled with the image of the hull of a passing red ship. This impression is created by a simple diagonal streak. As Mondriaan could evoke the hustle and bustle of New York streets in his Boogy Woogy paintings by placing a few yellow squares on a canvas, here, too, a whole world of content is revealed through the dramatic use of primary forms and colours.

Another more sculptural use of form is applied by Jaap de Jonge. In O.T.S., he displays 28 crystal balls in an octagonal showcase. We could be looking into the future! Each one shows a video by a different Dutch artist. To a certain degree, de Jonge abandons his individual stance as artist and creates in his work a public place, a medium for the expression of others. In a world of ever more technological media interaction, this is perhaps where we are heading.

I would like to conclude this personal rerview of timebased artworks with TIME/PIECE by Boris Gerrets. In a way, this piece is a monument to time: time as a paradox, time as a succession of fractions of reality, time as the astronomical entity governing nature. A small monitor is mounted inside a bronze construction, the kind we know from sundials or globes. It carries an inscription that reads Time is the mobile image of immobile eternity (a quote from Augustinus). We are unable to decipher the nervous image displayed on the monitor: what we can see is a rapid (1/50th second) sequence of stacked images. But when we approach the piece, the monitor starts revolving. Gradually, a single image appears stretching over the circumference of the globe. The movement of the monitor makes the images fan out over the whole circle of its trajectory.
Now it shows the development of time laterally instead of punctually. The revolving monitor displays a series of urban scenes, people and cars moving about in a strange unrealistic manner. They belong to the past but are oddly present in their stroboscopic three dimensionality. We can move around the piece ourselves and discover different aspects of the panorama. The work defines time as interaction between conflicting movements, which result in the creation of space: the movement inside the image, that of the image itself, the movement of the spectator perceiving it, and the reference to the larger astronomical movement in which he is caught.