2010
Interurban Gallery, Vancouver Canada.
The work used web cam, located on the roof of a twenty–story hotel, which observed a busy urban street with the working port of Vancouver and the snow–capped mountains beyond. This visual data was relayed to a series of five computers, which were programmed to feed a five–monitor display using the same sort of software as Taking Time. In this version of the project, the series of five monitors were mounted in a horizontal array, with each monitor displaying a different version of the same web cam image. The monitors resembled the hours, minutes and seconds panels of a digital clock face. On the monitor to the left, the image of the city was updated roughly 5 pixels at a time, with a total refresh rate of 1 minute. The monitor located immediately to its right used the same software, but here the process of image replenishment took place in 10-minutes. The next monitor in the line refreshed every 100 minutes, the next one every 1,000 minutes and the fifth, every 10,000 minutes. Human activity was clearly visible in the first monitor on the left, less visible on the second monitor, and by the third monitor from the left, people had all but disappeared, leaving the changing weather and light to play in the deserted streets. The fourth and fifth monitors from the left contained pixels recorded during both the day and during the night, and the whole clock-like structure rolled relentlessly forward as the exhibition continued.