TIME SLIP Is The Future Of Information

TIME SLIP takes the opposing stance in the worried and sometimes sanctimonious discourse on the spread of information and current events in our digital era. The installation by French media artist Antoine Schmitt, a pioneer and proponent of digital art in France, has taken hold of this virtual mass of information and ripped it from its original context through a simple, yet adept, generative process.

TIME SLIP is a self-driven program fed from the outgoing flow of information hubs (from press agencies such as Reuters, AP, and Agence France Presse), which takes the text from these feeds and conjugates them into future tense. The installation is programmed to pick up all the news agencies’ verbs, modifying them in real time. The results are then broadcast on an LCD screen displaying the information in the same way that digital screens in public spaces and press and trading offices do. The display reels off information such as “NASDAQ will drop by 5.6%,” “The Minister of […] will resign after allegations of corruptions,” or “The Miami Heat will beat the Boston Celtics by 102-91.”

On his website, the artist discusses the theoretical foundation of his installation:

TIME SLIP is a flexible work linked to the philosophical questioning of destiny, causal determinism, and after all is said and done, is a freely arbitrated work in a universe in which time and its causality can vacillate. It returns to the spectator control of their destiny. It’s also a commentary on the motor power of unpredictability and risk, more and more central in the contemporary world.

TIME SLIP exists in various forms depending on the exhibition:

- a lightweight installation, through which text is projected onto a wall in a public space
- a webpage on which rolling text continuously scrolls across the screen
- a heavy installation in which the text is screened through an electronic LED panel
- an internet RSS flow visible through any internet RSS reader (netvibes, etc…) (yet to be realized)