concept

Time can be perceived as change and movement; we can best grasp the passage of time via processes that intensively progress with it, such as the motion of sea waves, music or dance. We experience natural bodily movement as reflecting the inevitably constant progression of time.
Our installation arises from these notions, and provides a chance to control, explore and challenge the timing of a displayed action, thereby - ReTiming it.

The ReTime installation is based on an interactive dance video that is responsive in real time to sounds and music.
Viewers-players can manipulate the performance of a dancer in a short movie screened before them, exploring how music and sounds that they produce affect its timeline. By selection between different musical tracks, or even singing, clapping and playing a drum, the dancer will progress faster, slower, or perhaps will even go back in time.

A new timeline is created online during each specific experience.This ‘new time’ is perceived naturally through observing the movement, but is also documented quantitatively and visualized on a graph. During the interaction, a moving cursor appears on a supplementary screen, racing faster and slower on the ‘real’ timeline. Thus, the cursor indicates the viewer-player's exploration of time and movement and finally, a graph plotting the relationship between the Real-Time and the Re-Time is left as a trace.

In this manner, the viewer-player can reflect on his/her own experiment. Moreover, the various trends would be collected, computed, and presented as they gather. This display adds an additional view of the passage of time on a different timescale - throughout the presentation. By color-scaling the graphs according to the time from beginning of the installation, or by time of the day, we enable examination of systematic patterns of behaviors in the installation at different times.

The video is an improvisation of a professional dancer, moving in smooth and continuous gestures while exploring and investigating the physical and temporal degrees of freedom of his body.
Using a visual programming language (Pure Data) that is designed for manipulating signals in real-time, we are able to directly control the timeline of a pre-filmed video by parameters that are extracted online from incoming sounds to the computer. Our algorithm maps the inputs’ parameters, such as amplitude and beats or frequency, and converts them to changes in the progression of the timeline.
In absence of a sonic input to the computer, the video will stop. As soon as any sound is detected, the timeline progresses accordingly. At the same time, on the supplementary screen, a visual display follows the progression of the new timeline and plots it on a graph, overlaid on the graphs of the previous interactions.