Calvin Anderson: Time Goes On?

 

Time Goes On

by

Calvin Anderson

"Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us 

- 

they refer us only to the past, not to the present"

The Medium Is The Message - Marshall McLuhan

This is the quote I had in mind while coming up with the concept for my video. What McLuhan is saying, or at least what I think he is saying, is that we are constantly surrounded by media. Because it is so instantaneous we are forced to look back at media that already exists, even if it has only existed for a few seconds, instead of focusing on the present. 

"Time has ceased, space has vanished"

The Medium Is The Message - Marshall McLuhan

I was also very intrigued in trying to find out what McLuhan meant by this. I thought it was a really clever quote and I wanted to give my video the same feeling I got when I read it.

With these two quotes as my inspiration, the idea for my video came to me. I wanted to give the audience a sense that time had stopped (or been broken). I did this by editing in glitches, playing clips in reverse, and running the audio backward at some points. I also had a lot of fun playing with space and trying to make it feel as if it had "vanished". I did this by overlaying my videos to create a cloning effect, and by using the frame of my video to create a teleportation-like effect.

I wanted to take McLuhan's idea of media directing us to the past and push it a little further. Time Goes On is about someone who is stuck in a cycle. As time passes they keep moving forward, but they also keep looking back. Then the cycle breaks, the video glitches, and they try to go backward. The video tries to correct this mistake, get back to the present, hence all the reverse shots and the glitches. Until this person finally "breaks" time only for it to reverse again, putting him back to where he started. Living in the present, looking back at the past. Time continues to go on, and no matter what you cannot change the past.

"Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward"