Frequency Comb, 2024
single-channel 4K floor projection, laboratory jacks
05min 07sec loop with sound
Filmed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Tokyo and at the Hirasawa Kanga ruins, Tskuba, Japan
Installation view: Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa, Canada
”And what should happen if any of these talking clocks fail? DiCarlo’s work Frequency Comb (2024) explores exactly this in Tsukuba, Japan, where three atomic clocks went offline following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. An unprecedented event, it prompted Tsukuba’s time lab scientists to develop the quantum lattice clock, which utilizes more stable materials and reduces error. While scientists are currently thinking through the lattice clock’s implications for global trading and stock markets (more precise minutes means quicker and faster transactions, after all), DiCarlo’s newest work points towards how such a discovery might affect us in ordinary ways. Despite reassurances from Tsukuba’s scientists, who claim that such a clock would have little bearing on our daily lives, it is worth remembering that these infrastructures, as Ara Wilson aptly states, help “shape the conditions for relational life.” In exploring clock time’s fissures, DiCarlo’s artworks challenge UTC and the institutions that uphold it, as well as those who would continue to squeeze value out of our every waking minute (or second). Not simply works about time, her video and sound installations produce a malleable and embodied time that is, like us, boundless and always becoming.” (Justine Koheal, Tenuous Systems exhibition brochure, 2024)
