100 million seconds, 1996, D.N.K.
100 Million Seconds
Galerie Interglotzvisionen, Berlin
Behind a veil of textured glass, a series of television monitors flicker in silence. Abstract shadows move across the screens, indistinct and unreachable. The images—drawn from a random stream of contemporary TV programming—have been rendered unreadable. What remains is a choreography of light and motion without content, a trace of visual information.
The work, titled 100 Million Seconds, invites the viewer into a meditation on duration, perception, and the limits of understanding. 100 million seconds equal approximately thirteen years—an arbitrary yet concrete measure of lived time. In this span, civilizations evolve, technologies collapse and renew, memories fade. But here, time is condensed into a constant, pulsing presence behind obscured glass.
The textured surface acts as both filter and barrier. It transforms the luminous data beneath into a shifting abstraction, evoking the distortion of memory, the censorship of vision, and the futility of attempting to fix meaning in the torrent of contemporary media. Nothing can be identified. And yet, everything is still there—transmitting, waiting, ignored.
There is an echo, too, of the physics of light. Moving at 299,792,458 meters per second, light defines our perception of both time and space. The speed of light is a constant—an ultimate horizon—and yet, in this installation, even light becomes suspect. It reaches us delayed, refracted, and anonymized.
100 Million Seconds resists interpretation while embodying the conditions of now: oversaturation, illegibility, and distance. It asks what it means to see in a time when everything is visible, but little is clear.