When returning from my studio on the E Train last week, I stumbled on something weird about text. As I immersed myself deep into my book I noticed the distances between individual characters changing the more I understood what was written. Have you ever experienced the same? I used my thumb as a ruler, placing it over short sentences to verify the movement of their characters. To my horror I observed that anything placed on top of the words changed dimensions too. Convinced that I was witnessing words changing their meaning, I hastily changed trains at Pasila and returned to my studio to study the phenomenon. In my experiments, I noticed the effect was strongest in sentences referencing different guidelines and rules. I proceeded to measure the character dispersal rate and observed that different watch instruments indicated widely different dispersal speeds. For example, a watch made from a fossil did not measure significant changes and even helped to contain character movement and alphabetical jitters. But a watch containing Kurängen spring water accelerated letter movement: I saw words recompiling anew as if they were in a whirlpool. To permit safe return home I geared up with watches that affected character dispersals at different speeds. Passing the city, I used them to control the movements of floating letters and entire words, which had dislodged from between book covers and blocked my passage by hovering mid-air in public spaces. With practice, using my watch instruments I could reorder entire chapters when I needed to make room for thought. Armed with my timepieces I finally made it home and have since continued patrolling the district at night time. If you witness floating characters please get in touch immediately +358505729743
Score for the “Our Greatest Times” -performance executed by exhibition overseers & art mediators at Survival Kit 15 Measures: Wear the watch you enjoy the most and ask the public “What time is it?” when you get bored. Script details in in Latvian and English (.pdf) provided to the exhibition overseers. “Yli-Vakkuri’s frustrated, altered wristwatches, decorated with nonsensical objects, seashells and rocks, point to hiccups and ambiguities in the linear timeline.” Xenia Benivolski (e-flux)
