What does it mean to design the experience of the present moment?
I was gripped by a seemingly simple Dan Graham video and mirror work at the the MOVE exhibition, at the Hayward Gallery.
In Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past[s] [1974] the visitor becomes both performer and spectator simultaneously. The installation consists of a room containing a two-way mirror, a video camera and a monitor. The mirror reflects present time, the camera records the mirror’s continuous reflection, and the monitor plays back the recording after an 8-second delay.
‘A person viewing the monitor sees both the image of himself eight seconds ago, and what was reflected on the mirror from the monitor eight seconds ago of himself, which is sixteen seconds in the past … An infinite regress of time continuums within time continuum is created.’ Dan Graham
[Text from MOVE: CHOREOGRAPHING YOU, Hayward Gallery, London]