The Propagation of Uncertainty, 2019-2020
Three-channel video installation, server racks
Duration: 5 min. 40 sec.
Forward by Charles Stankievech
Exhibition Essay by Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman
Sound Engineer: Ashton Price
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the official time standard that airports, stock markets, and wireless communications rely on, is anything but absolute. Through a month-long process, collected asynchronous data from 82 master atomic clocks around the world is processed at the International Bureau for Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris. Once reckoned, BIPM produces a monthly report known as the Circular T – or the world’s most accurate clock. The Propagation of Uncertainty takes its name from the statistical calculation used in the Circular T’s creation, an equation that assumes error in every value and accounts for variables such as drifted local clock readings and noise interceptions during data transfers. Using a “post-real time” process, the report illustrates how a multiplicity of deviated pasts inform our future’s official, singular “present.” Ultimately clock time is an estimation of potential errors and a calculation of unknowns. Filmed in Canada’s official time dissemination room at the National Research Council in Ottawa, the project collages eighteen “talking clock” recordings from thirteen time zones as the video’s soundtrack. As a meditation on the temporal body at odds with time’s infrastructure, the work moves through moments of discordant simultaneity, a chronological survey by time zone and a bass-heavy beat of resistance.
Exhibition history:
Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa, Canada (Jan. 31 - Apr. 14, 2024)
the plumb gallery, Toronto, Canada (Nov. 2 - Dec. 3, 2023)
Art Museum, University of Toronto, Canada (Oct. 28 - Nov. 11, 2020)