A new arts project at the Science Museum…and it’s about time.
Matt Brown
The Science Museum has unveiled the largest exhibition by a single artist it has ever hosted, Grace Weir’s In My Own Time. The exhibition comprises four video installations that explore the meaning of time, and how we perceive it. The high-definition films mix hard science with philosophical and cultural notes—most incongruously when a skit about general relativity is followed by several minutes of footage of a lactating cow.
A temporal quartet
These scenes come from the titular centrepiece, ‘In My Own Time’. This short documentary dominates one end of the room, and the artist’s narration can be heard from every quarter. Perhaps intentionally, the film can be joined at any point, based as it is on a series of vignettes rather than a linear narrative. Themes covered include the measurement of time and relativistic effects, and how different animals may perceive time. There’s even a cameo from a DeLorean, the car used as a time machine in the popular ‘Back to the Future’ films.
A neighbouring booth cocoons the second film, ‘A deep field for the time deaf’. This apparently static image of the night sky soon begins to flicker, with stars and galaxies fluctuating in brightness through the twenty-minute cycle. The work is actually an animation, put together from Hubble Space Telescope deep field images. The artist is reinforcing that powerful message—the light we see from the stars is centuries old. “The only time we can see the past is when we look at the night sky”, says Weir.
‘Picture of the floating world’ is much more down to Earth, featuring hypnotic imagery of scenes from a park, where pond water ripples and cherry blossom falls. Time seems to speed up, or slow down, as mundane happenings are given unexpected attention.
Finally, ‘A little bit of unknown’ shows a conversation between the artist and physicist Paul Tod. As Weir asks five questions about black holes, the scene sweeps out from the physicist’s study to a view of the cosmos.
A complex sense of time
Although Weir trained as an artist, science, and particularly astrophysics, has long fascinated her, and much of her oeuvre has focussed on space and time. “As a film maker, I’ve always been drawn to light and motion”, she says. “Physics is concerned with similar things. I think that’s part of the attraction for me.” The latest films were created during an eight week artists’ residency at St John’s College, Oxford. "I hope that visitors to the exhibition will leave with a more complex sense of time, of the connection between the concept of one’s self as a being in time, and the sense of one’s life as a narrative”, says Weir.