TIME TOGETHER
[2012]

Time Together (2012/13) was commissioned by the Baltic Triennial as a daily broadcast in twelve episodes. It is a constellation of astronomical data, instructional video, genre fiction and ethnography played in varying modes of performance by an actress, a model, an artist and a nuclear physicist.

Two women meet in the station after one misses her stop. A compliant relationship develops, as one leads the other though a series of exercises towards becoming an active participant in their group of friends. The narrative slips between the description of a friendship of imbalanced power, a business, political cell or religious cult, but what is consistent is the tension between empathic friendship and usefulness.

This fiction foregrounds a number of artist actions and performances that were enacted during the Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania in the summer of 2012. The video builds on the work of filmmaker Jean Rouch's ethnographic system of Radical Fabulation, where fictional scenarios were devised to foreground and sometimes interact with the ethnographic subject.

Each episode is a performance, a record of the energy of that particular time. Unlike a conventional film, the shooting editing and first public screening of each episode all happen across a nine hour window, which places each in its own present tense, and separate from that which proceeds or follows it.

Each episode is linked to its relative cosmological time, through a weather forecast of current solar activity observed by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, a satellite launched to address those aspects of the sun and solar system that directly affect life and society.

"Time Together, then, in its conjunctions of past and present, might be a model of nonlinear time that allows for the influence of mysterious ambient forces on humanity; that puts faith at once in science and magic." Martin Herbert, Art Review Dec 2012.