So We Beat On

Saturday night, I saw two installations during Nuit Blanche that made quite an impression. First was Christian Marclay's The Clock, an acclaimed video "mash-up" that is currently running at The Power Plant until November 15. Comprising of thousands of movie clips synched to the current time, it was a neat commentary on how we modern humans have sliced our daily experiences into ever smaller intervals.

The first thing you notice are the presence of all the clocks and watches on screen. It made the piece seemed gimmicky: 24 hours of this? No doubt a herculean effort, but it seems tiresome. Then you find some commonalities. Since I watched it from 7:15 pm to 7:45 pm, a lot of people were either sitting down to dinner, getting ready to go out, or waiting for a companion to show. But perhaps that's just a natural outcome of "typical" scenarios on film. Then you realize that some sounds or music bleed from one scene to the next so that you are not quite sure if the audio belong to the current shot or not. And furthermore, some scenes don't have any time pieces at all but serve as establishing shot connecting disparate clips. For example, a record needle being lowered taken from a grainy black-and-white leading to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman preparing to leave their place while their stereo played. Or amusingly, Arsenio Hall and his co-star from a Spike Lee production remarking on the arrival of a car, only to have Inspector Clouseau getting out of his Citroen and engaging in a farcical gag about syncing watches. So in fact, careful consideration had been made in its hypnotic construction from its many parts.

The second installation was equally immersive, but in the audio dimension. Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet installation at Trinity-St.Paul Church was a circle of 40 speakers. Standing in the centre allows you to hear wonderful polyphonic singing. As such, many people stood or sat, with eyes closed, to experience a soothing envelope of sound that seemed timeless. But music, with its metronome and bars, also divide the world into intervals. And if you stood close to each speaker, you will hear each single voice, 40 individual parts that combine into a larger whole.

Note that Trinity-St. Paul will have a live concert of the piece sung in the installation, Spem In Alium, by the Toronto Consort on October 19 and 20.