A R C H I E F1 9 9 7  
15th
  Dan Boord, Luis Valdovino & Greg Durbin
A refutation of time
  USA 1997
Videotape, 8:16, colour, mono
 
Student Inez Sanchez de Menard realizes that all logic is circular and that the reasoning person remains locked in the rituals of his own fictitious assumptions. This declaration is reinforced by a paraphrase of a famous statement: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man; all men are Socrates". The rest of the tape is the filmed content of a strange e-mail message that Inez received without knowing from whom. The message is a loose and practical philosophical exposition about the nature of time and follows a chain of associations and tall stories. The steps from one to the other are associative and apparently chance. Like the search command on the World Wide Web for Route 66 which brings you to the diners on the famous and finely serenaded road. But also to the amazing figure of Will Rogers, the singing cowboy who performed marvels with the lasso. Attention is also paid to the Argentinean tango singer Gardel and so you discover that both men died in the same year, and both as a result of a plane crash. The apparent logic of the Web makes the chance nature of the association between such facts mysterious and meaningful. Narrative connections arise where you would expect to find logical ones. You yourself are the director of those connections and you 'read' them according to your own associations. Jorge Luis Borges in the thirties, wrote a number of essays about time and the experience of time in which he came to the conclusion that time is an illusion. He advised setting yourself free from the linear approach to time. He pointed to the cyclical nature of our appreciation of time and finds there the motivation to take that flight from time. He is also quoted: "Denying time, actually consists of two denials: the denial of the sequence of periods in a series and the denial of the synchronicity of periods in two series". To the makers of this tape this, apparently, is an essence of our non-linear future which seems to have found its natural habitat in the new media. In this sense, the tape can be summarized as a narrative experiment with non-linearity in a linear medium. Story lines branch in a network of connections which are hardly reconcilable with our sense of reason. They are on the very edge. Or, as the student says in the epilogue: "That which we almost understand, but never really do".

– Willem van Weelden

voicemen Michelle Cuomo, Dan Boord, Music Flaco Jimenez, J.S. Bach, Bob Wills, Thanks to Abbas, Jayna, Joseph Marshall, Mia, Michelle


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