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The Theory of Time Here

Roderick Coover

2007 00:06:32 United KingdomEnglishColorStereo16:9Video

Description

It is TIME at a street corner in London... A collaboration between filmmaker Roderick Coover and writer Deb Unferth, this short marks the textual disintegration of the speaking clock in an unnerving portrait of technology, power, and the urban environment.

The Theory of Time Here is a formalist work about the speaking clock and its proverbial voice. Its repetitive, calming tone distracts from the fact that it represents a marriage of the two most inescapable and oppressive authorities--technology and time. Here familiar images and phrases become playfully disassembled and reassembled. Whatever choices the humans make are constrained by--and expressed within the conditions of--the powerful forces of technology. These forces are expressed through convention. They may approach total disintegration, yet somehow, perhaps through convention, they right themselves, and begin again.

About Roderick Coover

Roderick Coover makes cross-cultural works that straddle the border of documentary and narrative art to raise provocative challenges about ethnographic method both within and beyond the field of anthropology. His works have been featured internationally at festivals, exhibitions, and conferences in the fields of anthropology, art, film, and new media. His media works include the documentary, Language of Wine and the CD-ROM, Cultures In Webs: Working in hypermedia with the documentary image.  Published in journals such as Visual Anthropology and Visual Studies, Coover is the recipient of LEF, Fulbright and Mellon fellowships, among others. He teaches at Temple University.