What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
—Saint Augustine
The passage of time is probably the most basic facet of human perception; we feel time slipping by in our inner most selves in a manner that is uniquely intimate and unlike our experience of other fundamental properties such as space or mass. Time is compared to the flight of an arrow or the flow of a stream but as accurate as these images feel there is nothing in physics that corresponds to the passage of time. Some regard time as a human illusion; there is only now and nothing else.
As we generally experience time by observing change or difference, similarly, in film, motion is only perceived by observing the small changes or differences from one frame to the next. Paradoxically, the film image must come to a complete stop to be projected on the screen in order to create the illusion of movement. Similarly, our ability to perceive time seems to be only possible when we stop to observe it.
Time Being is essentially 88 short films and even though each shot or sequence is exactly the same length, the viewer’s subjectivity will determine how long each unit feels. The structure of the film subverts conventional temporal expectations and gives rise to the perception of a continuous present tense in the film.
Time Being originates on film, as the mechanical apparatus of the motion picture camera is a metaphor for the mechanical definition of time by a clock mechanism. One’s perception of time then is deliberately linked to the mechanical, physical, analogue world in which humans operate.
Perhaps time needs space to exist in the same way an image needs to depict space, in order to exist. Time Being depicts timespace to see the clock ticking in the movement of everyday life. Humans have an innate, intuitive understanding of time, acquired through experience, yet when one has to explain what time is one is tangled in paradox and contradiction.