Elasticity of time

Among the works presented, it is perhaps in tx-reverse (2019) and in 1MTH/MIN (2021) that the digital image appears in all its temporal elasticity. While Martin Reinhart and Virgil Widrich use a special camera to carry out a 360-degree “scan” of the inside of a movie theater full of spectators, Ethann Néon captures the whole of spring 2020, by day and by night, but with a fixed camera, confined inside an apartment just like the artist. From these “extended” captures, it is at the level of the algorithm that these works were modeled, with surprising results. In tx-reverse, the morphology of the movie theater stretches and contracts horizontally, and with it the bodies of the audience present, who seem to set out on an initiatory journey through a mysterious and distorted space-time. Ethann Néon, for his part, chooses to sculpt his images in vertical bands, between which and within which the very slow passing of lockdown time becomes amusing and vertiginous.