10.53 mins | 2010
Using a video camera, a firewire cable and a laptop, the artist attempted time travel on a train from Bangalore to Bangarapet. She placed a video camera at the front of a train car, facing out the door. Live video feed was sent from the camera to the laptop, which sat in front of a second door at the back of the train car. When viewing the laptop she was able to see approximately 1/10th of a second into the “future”.
Tara Kelton is an Indian-American artist in Bangalore, India. Tara’s work considers the traditional figure of the artist (and craftsperson) in relation to the digital. Working in a variety of media she reflects on the diminishing role of the human in contemporary society (replaced by automation, AI and digital mediation) and the remote algorithmic control of labor by western bodies and corporations. Tara is co-editor of the publishing series Silicon Plateau, an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in Bangalore.
Interview of Tara Kelton with Charu Maithani
Charu Maithani [CM] // In the work Time Travel, I see the screen, the laptop screen specifically, as the protagonist of the work. It is the relationship of the screen with images, frames, spaces and time that plays out in the work. Would you agree with this reading of the work?
Tara Kelton [TK] // My work doesn’t typically feature a protagonist, but if there is one in this work it is the sincere attempt (and failure) at time travel, which if not a protagonist is at least a kind of ‘punchline’ to the work.
Also central to the work is its physical structure – although it uses digital equipment the kind of ‘analog’ nature and simplicity of the set-up between the laptop and the camera is a way I typically work. The tech isn’t too complex or sophisticated, but intentionally loose and casual (where it can be quickly thrown together and the ideas and subject matter take precedence over any technical wizardry).
I think the work is also thinking about representation and the speed of images, where the represented image arrives before the subject, in a reversal.
CM // The video shows a laptop screen on one end of a train car receiving a video feed from a camera that is looking out of a door at the front-end of the train car. This way the screen is a window to the future. Considering trains were an important development in the industrial revolution, the juxtaposition of a journey into the future is interesting. What was your thinking process behind using a mode of transport to create a video-feed?
TK // I made this work a decade ago, I have to time travel a bit to remember, and also cheat and copy paste some of my thoughts from the past. I was on a train from New York to New Haven when the idea came to me, but I think it was a coalescing of some things I was thinking about at the time, emerging from that particular technological moment. I was producing work that manipulated and inhabited digital platforms like Street View, Google Docs, Twitter, looking at how they were compressing and altering time, space and location, and at the simultaneity introduced by the internet, of multiple planes and windows.
Screens had become a material, more physical substance with which to work with and I started to think about them as sculptural objects. Our new devices functioned as prostheses that extended our abilities, and vision, both spatially and temporally, and this opened up a lot of new possibilities.
With an increase in computational power also came the ability to physically manipulate video in an instant, where it could be distorted and played with, overlaid and collaged, and a lot of us were working with video in this way at the time.
To me Time Travel occupies a gray area between documentation and artwork – I also think of it as public artwork, an intervention on a train (for the time it was installed there). I am interested in the street / public space not just for their material qualities but also for the audience and for how the work can operate in different modes. In another project I co-curated, The Chroma Show, we took over a wall of televisions inside a retail electronics store, and displayed 40 video works on TVs that were for sale. Our audience was people who had come to see the show but also just lots of people trying to buy televisions.
Although this is more incidental than intentional, the railway system was also the reason time was first standardized across locations. Until then time was set using sundials or local clocks and had a more natural relationship to the sun. Trains marked the transition from organic time to objective, rational time.
CM // The video offers a visualisation to rethink the relationship between movement and time. We witness the space changing in time. Simultaneously, we experience duration while we are moving spatially. Dilation, acceleration and compression of time is enacted in various ways. It makes me wonder about how time is mediated in different ways through techniques, technologies, and media. In a way time is the material of this video that you mould in various ways. On the other hand, in your other works such as Autoportrait, you analyse the ‘value’ of time in relation to digital labour and surveillance. Are various attributes of time important to your practice? I mean how deliberate are you about thinking and working with time in your practice?
TK // I was in graduate school in a core class where I picked time and aging as a subject to make work about. From early childhood I have been obsessed with and terrified of death and permanence. I know exactly how much it costs to be cryogenically frozen (just your head is cheaper) and I can’t get a tattoo.
I am fascinated by the relative perception (and elasticity) of time, like how flies experience time so differently to humans because of the speed at which their neurons fire; time alters as our neurons age, causing our experience of time to grow faster (they’re inversely proportionate) and half our experienced lives are already over by the time we turn about 7. There are exercises you can do to mitigate this but they’re not much fun – time slows down, but you’re bored.
I also structure my life and work by my menstrual cycles, after reading a Forbes magazine article a few years ago that talked about harnessing the different strengths you have at different times in your cycle. There’s a creative phase, verbal phase, task-oriented phase, etc. Only two days a month are good for writing and communication, so it’s taken me four months to answer these questions!
Although the focus of my work has shifted more towards labor (gig economy workers, online labor) and technological infrastructure (such as the physical attributes of IT parks), the common thread across my practice is an interest in the social effects of everyday technologies and the changing relationship between humans and machines. After Time Travel, in a work called Leonardo, I discovered a portrait drawing booth (machine) at a mall that would ‘draw’ your portrait by taking a photo, running it through a digital filter and then spitting out a printed drawing signed ‘Leonardo’. I placed a mirror inside the booth and had the machine draw its self portrait.
CM // Interestingly, the relationship between the frame of the laptop screen and what’s around it is starkly different in the moving train and when it is stationary. The difference between the visuals on the screen and the space in which the laptop is are quite different. The mechanism of the whole set-up presents itself in an uncanny manner when the train is stationary – the screen is a wormhole where people and things disappear as they cross the boundary of the (laptop screen) frame. Instead, some other people and things are seen on screen. This relationship between the inside and outside helps us perceive both images, so unlike a window that fixes us inside the frame, this setup forces us to look around and beyond the frame of the laptop screen. How does the immobility of the train play into this formal dialectics of the set-up?
TK // It does ‘work’ better when the train is moving but I never imagined time travel would really be achieved – it wasn’t important to me whether it worked or not, so much as that it was attempted. To me the purity is in how the singular simple mechanism that I’ve set up plays out across the work and the introduction of cuts or any other digital manipulation would undermine that gesture. The moments where the train is stationary also shift the viewer’s focus to the process and mechanics of the work and end up as a nice kind of glimpse ‘behind the curtain’.
CM // You describe the video as an attempt in time-travelling, could you describe other experiments that you have done or thought of about time-travel?
TK // I haven’t done other time travel experiments but I have done similar mock science experiments like a video I made called Relative Motion, in which I filmed a moving pendulum and then used video editing software to move each frame of the video in order to keep the pendulum static – you see the frame of the video swing back and forth while the pendulum remains stationary. The humor to me is in the tension or contradiction between the faux-serious premise of these experiments and their clearly visible failure.
The way in which both art and science ‘high’ concepts are represented to a mass audience is a recurring element in my work. I enjoy poking at the authority of images, western visual cultures, institutions (and even closed digital systems). I want to challenge the relationship between the high and low brow, to study how cultural power manifests in images.
June 2022