RETIME - an installation by collaborating artists

Excerpt from the catalogue:

The idea of RETIME came to me when I was in Newcastle, writing the application for the ASEM Korean exchange professor programme. How could I work with others and make palpable the exchange between cultures, and place? Distance, proximity, language, interpretation, and exchange are all measures and means of negotiating a relationship to time and place. How could I use these means and my solely collaborative practice as an artist to explore the territory of a cultural exchange? I needed to work with a medium that could traverse space and create a mutually formed work from a set of individual ideas and artist practices. Email, and the negotiation of time differences between here and there gave me the medium and a process with which to make this collaborative installation.

[...]

Image, object, light, space and sound come together in the space of the exhibition to form a representational language that negates individual works and geographies, the interpreted works acting as collaborative elements of a single installation work, responsive to the time and space of its display. In this space, audiences must negotiate these elements of the installation without the originary co-ordinates of authorship. Who made what? When? Without these co-ordinates there is no single origin or departure point for the work. Instead the audience must orientate themselves to points within this mutually conceived topography of instances, and arrive at a physical and temporal interface where the work is present, all at once, in the real time duration of the viewer's experience.

Andy Thomson, July 2003