Chronos XXI, 2017

Chronos the god of time, permanently destroys and recreates. He who symbolises evanescence and return, was the thematic point of departure for the creation of the kinetic media installation Chronos XXI. The piece is a ‘finger exercise on antiquity’ by our Creative Director Joachim Sauter and was created during his residency at Villa Massimo in Rome.

A pendulum continuously swings in front of a monitor. This motion controls the slow synthesis and destruction of depictions of Chronos on the monitor. Chronos appears in various interpretations by painters of the late Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism – as a man who disrobes Veritas, as a performer of volatile music, or docking Cupid’s wings, or as children and crop eating, a scythe and an hour glass carrying, beardy and winged old man.

In addition to these historical depictions newly generated images appear. For that, the neuronal network of an artificial intelligence was trained with historical Chronos paintings. Its resulting ‘hallucinations’ of Chronos are fed into the continuous flow of images.

Occasionally, Chronos’ counterpart Kairos who represents a single moment in time, slips in and interrupts the pictorial meditation about the constant rhythm of existence.