Time travel in interactive 3D art installation
‘Honey I’m Home’ is the title of an interactive art and sound installation in which you can time travel. As soon as you enter the house, wearing headphones and moving through the space, you are confronted at various points with snippets of conversations, statements and sound fragments from past lives of people who once inhabited this space.
Time as a concept intrigues photographer, art director and artist YANi immensely. “I have an eternal fascination with places where you feel something has happened, that can make you feel good or uncanny. I realise that time is piled up under your feet. Where you are sitting on a chair now, eighty years ago a man was sitting there with a bandage on his arm because he had injured himself with his scythe, and 125 years ago someone was sitting there who just felt extremely happy at that moment,” he says. Uncovering these fragments of time is similar to a geologist excavating and reconstructing fragments from deep layers of earth.
For a year and a half, YANi and production designer and art director Roland Mylanus worked on realising the installation. They sketched, sawed, built and laid an intricate puzzle to programme the interface in such a way that it was user-friendly and applicable in the art installation. Four placed sensors register exactly where the visitor is in the installation and selects the right fragments, to which well-known theatre and film writer Don Duyns, among others, contributed.
Sound snatches
For instance, music can be heard in the distance, rumbling on the stairs or the ticking of a typewriter. Sex sounds rise from the shower, a landline phone rings, a voice whispers in your ear and the wind blows. Walking around the room, visitors also make wacky discoveries, hearing funny sayings and quips about the interior and the people who once lived their lives here. The place connected by time with objects in the room make visitors extra aware. At the same time, the fragments invite us to use our imagination and further fill in the incomplete histories. Thus, we merge past times with stories in the here and now.
The floor of the house’s living room and bathroom are composed of detachable pallets that can also be thought of as time planes, on which the timeless interior is cut through time. Even the picture frames are intersected as interior modifications have been made right through time. The entire house is literally wrapped in a cream-coloured cast and lacquered layer – from the immense cactus to the shower curtain.
Mummified time
The monochrome colour and material are a metaphor for time that seems to have stood still. A frozen, mummified time. It evokes associations with the petrified city of Pompei and Egyptian mummification. In terms of atmosphere, it is reminiscent of Edward Kienholz’s artwork The Beanery or films by David Lynch, in which, despite the ostensibly peaceful and safe suburbs with their immaculate houses, lawns and sprinklers, you still get the feeling that something sinister is about to happen. Or has happened. That layering is the driving force behind Honey I’m Home.
The installation also carries a personal story. Thanks to a generous donation from a cousin of YANi, the extensive project could be realised. He lives on in a voice fragment as well as through a stack of books in the cupboard: six titles that, according to him, can save the world.
‘Honey I’m home’ can be visited by appointment
Until Sunday 22 June – Schram Studio’s, Grasweg 52, Amsterdam-Noord
7 until 20 July – Overdiemerweg 38 C, Diemen
Call YANi: 06 54251808 or send an email: yani@yanipictures.com
Text: Viveka van de Vliet
