"The Clock" is a multilayered interactive experience. Upon entering the exhibition space, the viewer sees an animation of a clock in the position of an artwork, with a QR code next to it. When the user scans the QR code with their device, they will be lead to a website that has what seems to be the artwork's statement.
When the viewer indicate that they have finished reading the statement, they are reminded of the amount of time that they have spent on reading it. The clock on the wall has been moving nonstop. If the clock is indeed the artwork, the art itself has changed when the viewer buries themselves in the statement. It is now revealed that what they just spent time on was a "pseudo-statement" -- made up by tweaking a piece of existing literature that discusses the concept of time. Words from the original statement were selected and randomly altered by a computer program to generate this "pseudo-statement" that is grammatically correct but by design senseless. These two steps of randomization ensure that each viewer has a unique piece of writing on their screen.
So, if the clock on the wall is not the art, then what is the art?
The art is the summation of the collaboration between the artist and each viewer across space and time. The former provides a framework and the latter, their time.
The viewer's experience is concluded when they are presented with a visualization of their participation in this artwork -- a clock with part of its face corresponding to the viewer's time spent highlighted.
This archive website is created to document each collaboration and serves as the witness of the growth of this artwork.
This work discusses the distance between abstraction and substance, the definition of an object and the object itself. This distance is measured in the transformation of the viewers' perceptions of time through the experience. When the viewer first sees the clock, it is the most common, mundane, and abstract representation of time. In the "pseudo-statement", the viewer is offered a seemingly profound, de facto meaningless, but in any case equally abstract definition of time.
The viewer concludes the experience without a true definition of time, but instead a genuine, physical feeling of its passage. A definition is absent, but time, the object itself, has left a clear impact. This impact is unique to each viewer. The visualization provided to the viewer when they leave shares the same abstraction as the clock they saw when they first entered, but now that the viewer has had a genuine experience of time, the common becomes exclusive, the mundane becomes peculiar, and the abstract forms a bijection with the substantial experience.