A Parallel Planets piece by Unknown
Parallel Planets presents Karborn
in Evidence of Time Travel
in Evidence of Time Travel
Story by Jacintha Yap
Mentioned: temporal displacements, time travelling, and out-of-body experiences
* * *
21 August 2014. 5:24 PM
You close your eyes.
Time stands still in that brief period of darkness. It doesn’t move like the hands of your bedside clock. It stays stubborn and stagnant, like an expired dream that clings on to your consciousness. You are awake (or so you think) but instead of reality, you register something else. Images flash before you, your mind reels, a seven–sequence hyper color dream. Haunting visuals and melancholic subtitles that instruct you how to feel.
Welcome to Karborn’s world.
Karborn is a London-based artist who combines complex digital processes with organic elements to create mind–blowing pieces in which beauty and disorder interact with the understanding and reality of the world.
A world where surveillance TV glitches are common place and a sense of temporal displacement is embraced as part of the everyday. Are you being watched by the apparitions that grace Karborn’s many visuals? You have stumbled into a dark labyrinth — the ghostly threshold of the temporal universe that Karborn has created, a place where time travelling has become a reality, the reality. In here, you witness images of torn, ruthless smiles through crashed distortion.
I see time travelling as a sort of the end of the world. There is not just one world. You travel to the past, to the present, and then to the future. Repeat. Your past becomes duplicated, your present manifests in numerous versions — there is no singular present anymore. The past is no longer static because its a door you constantly re-visit. And with each visceral revisit, the past becomes the present and if your past is your present, what kind of a future is there? Time, or what we know of time, would be torn asunder and so would our concepts of our world. And so, I see Karborn’s Evidence of Time Travel through the lens of dystopia.
Evidence of Time Travel is an aberrant and sinister sonic and visual investigation of the terrors and pleasures of temporal displacement. It is also a phrase coined by Karborn himself. In that world, there is one truth that anchors everything. It is that time is a concept that humans pinned down. It was not something that was given to us; it was a system that was created. What is time? Just hazy numbers in a sequence just like the distorted subtitles in Karborn’s visuals.
“Even the television becomes a portal.”
Growing up, I had always watched everything with subtitles. I loved the absolute clarity that came along with it as well as the reliability of subtitles, but I also saw them as instructions. When the sound was muted, only the subtitles stayed relevant. It instructed us on what was happening, what the characters were saying and thinking. The same goes for Karborn’s subtitles, which float around his canvases, instructing us how to feel, like cyborgs in a dystopian world.
His works generate a certain out of body experience — a distinctive pull that separates the body and the soul. You fall into a trance watching the hyper color dream unfold and the only things your mind reacts to are the instructions in Karborn’s works, as though they are messages from the future. Somewhere along the line, you are convinced that the television is a portal and against all logic, your laptop is likely a portal too.
Karborn and his collaborators have created an immersive world that is animated and bursting with life, even when it's just virtual projection on our screens. Evidence of Time Travel is like a spaceship that travels deeper and deeper into space, into dark matter, until reality becomes an unreality.
The vessels in Evidence of Time Travel are full of whispers in their world, filled with quiet truths, amidst distortion and anonymous faces. Is time travelling a temporal displacement and if so, would it feel like that?
We have been granted an ephemeral out of body experience — a ticket to a world where time traveling is reality and nothing is lucid.
Welcome to Karborn’s world.
21 August, 5:57 PM
You open your eyes and you were convinced
everything that happened was a dream.
More from Karborn: Website
