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Examine the inevitability of time

Create a work that examines the inevitability of the passing of time, as well as the desire to hold onto youth

In 1913, a cast of Camille Claudel’s The Age of Maturity, from a sculpture originally commissioned by the French state, was made for a private client, Captain Tissier. Often interpreted as an autobiographical work, illustrating her muse Auguste Rodin being drawn away from his young lover by his ageing mistress, the sculpture can also be read as an allegory – the central figure turns his back on youth as he moves towards ageing and death.

In 2019, emerging artists from the University of Melbourne were commissioned to create a piece that examines the theme of inevitability, as well as the desire to hold onto youth. Their responses analyse our relationship with time through the themes of nostalgia, memory, love and death.

Response

In a dimly-lit studio, four chairs are arranged in front of four blocky, 1990s-era TV monitors with blank, blueish screens.

Four young people - two male and two female - enter and sit in the chairs, and each inserts a waiting videotape into a VCR connected to their TV.

The four screens display a selection of clips, including a swirling image in rainbow colours, and purple text scrolling across a colour-bar test screen, reading either simply 'It', or phrases such as 'just save my money and try to buy back my childhood', or 'Once I found a Furby'.

One TV shows an old video image of a Furby rotating on a stand.

One of the TVs displaying a colour-bar test screen has text scrolling across that reads, 'I consider myself a 90s kid'.

Three of the viewers are wearing headphones to watch the TVs, but one isn't. He stares at the word 'me' on his colour-bar test screen.

When the videotapes finish playing, there's a burst of static, then the blank, blue screen returns to each monitor.

The last of the viewers takes off her headphones, gets up from her seat and leaves the studio with the four blank TV screens facing the empty chairs just as they were at the beginning.

Fade to black.

Kirby Medway

Magnetic Tape

Artist Statement

Magnetic Tape is an interactive, video installation experienced by watching a series of VHS tapes across a series of TVs. It is a response to the enduring commercial power of The 90s and its increasing vagueness as a period of time. It takes place in the year 8100 and concerns the discovery of a Furby that may or may not be from the year 1998. This piece explores the power of one Furby, and by extension…capitalism, to influence the passage of time.