Tempo e Tempo

Transmedia project, with artworks:

Tempo-imagem, 2024
Transmedia installation, 2.5x2.5m
Realtime weathercam streams, algorithm, machine, projection, mirror

Tempo-palavra, 2024
Projection mapping, variable dimensions
Text, algorithm, projection

In my mother tongue, Time and Weather are the same. Tempo e Tempo begins with the double meaning of the word tempo in Portuguese, signifying both chronological time and non-linear weather. At present, two formulations—image and word—question this entanglement through different facets of time and language in the post-digital condition.

In the installation Tempo-Imagem (Time-Image), a machine peripherally scans and displays in real time open-access web and weather cameras that observe the world (skies, forests, glaciers, mountains, and seas) in order to train a local language model with real-time climate imagery and data. A computer vision algorithm detects changes in weather conditions across these streams and their probabilities. By performing this task slowly and kinetically in space, the machine critically grants human access to a typically hidden stage of unsupervised machine learning in climate models, unfolding on a cinematic scale of Earth.

The installation sheds light on the gaps and inverts the logic of climate interest: places with a lower incidence of weather cameras in the Global South gain more screen time as the machine scans across the globe and its different areas of concentration of climate data available. Rooted in media art history, Tempo-Imagem follows the thread left open by La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1970) in search of a time-image. By shifting from the movie camera’s “center” to the “periphery” of decentralized computational capture, it moves further “(…) toward an entangled vision of the world as it unfolds” (Coletta, 2023) through an anti-colonial viewpoint, bridging the natural-artificial divide in search of a world where many worlds fit in.

In Tempo-Palavra (Time-Word), a stream of text is projected onto the floor at a fixed speed, traversing the interstice of space and bodies. The text consists of a litany, composed of a growing dataset of prompts and verses for a plurality of images of time, written in two forms of the Portuguese language. The installation grants this timeless dataset form, speed, and light, inviting careful reading in space. Crafted with both diligence and a resistance to artificial automation, each entry begins and ends with a different meaning of the word tempo, navigating the verbal tenses (tempos verbais) of Brazilian and European Portuguese in search of a syntax of time in the post-colonial present.

As an ongoing research project, new formulations of time will continue to emerge.

Produced in collaboration with Ricardo Vieira within the framework of the European Media Art Platform residency program at gnration with support from the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.