This is an emulation of a number station, transmitting messages from other temporalities, where time operates beyond 24/7 regimes. The Latin palindrome In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni can be translated as “We wander in circles at night and are consumed by fire.” Repeated constantly, it accompanies the back-and-forth movement of everyone involved in the processes of production, maintenance, and observation of everything that will happen over the next four months.

There was a Greek philosopher, Anaximander, who was the first to suggest that all things, including the Earth and the sky, arise from a single primal principle, the Apeiron, the boundless source of all opposites. The Earth is its dense form, and air its opposite. They are different expressions of the same continuous process of transformation.

This installation is dedicated to the engineers, experimenters, and artists who investigated the connections between sound, technology, and transmission. The need to receive, process, and send signals as quickly and efficiently as possible opened a distinct field of knowledge in telecommunication technologies. Some of its aspects—telephony, signal processing, radio transmission, and speech synthesis—opened up new ways to apply both scientific and artistic imagination.

This is a homage to Pendulum Music, a 1968 piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich. As Reich described it, the work was created “for fun” as an experiment driven by curiosity. It is both a phase piece and a process piece — a composition that runs autonomously once set in motion, allowing the composer to step away.

The installation is an 8-channel sound work, where time signals are subsequently interfered with children counting out rhymes. The time signals have a strict utilitarian purpose and are used as a reference to determine the time of day. Not only humans but machines too are sensitive to it.

The time signals have a strict utilitarian purpose and are used as a reference to determine the time of day. Not only humans, but machines too, are sensitive to them. Coordinated Universal Time — an imposed time — splits space into time zones and divides days into slots for labor and leisure. A seemingly ordered and planned timing of the day bends the stream of life. It establishes hours through a hierarchy of choices we make throughout the day.