'Fast-forward flashback'
While the minutes pass, we go back for hours...
Fast-forward flashback consists of a black square acrylic board with the hour marks of a clock. However, the marks are tubes with electro-luminescent wires that follow the sizes of the famous 12 Chinese pitch pipes arranged together looking like a sun. On the board, it says ‘Kunlun' 崑崙,
a calligraphy painted in white.
The Chinese music system has twelve pitch pipes (shi’er lü 十二律). Legend has it that the Yellow Emperor 黃帝 had a minister, Ling Lun 伶倫, who listened to the song of the phoenix at Mount Kunlun 崑崙. Ling Lun then used the majestic bird’s sounds to conceive the Chinese 12-tone musical system.
In Fast-forward flashback, phoenix tail feathers are the clock hands. They are made from blank aluminium, cut and sanded by hand by the artists. The minutes (tall feather) go clockwise but hours (small feather) go counter-clockwise. The artists designed a fourth gear to reverse the direction of the small feather and then had a clockmaker create it and put it inside a (tower) clockwork. When a feather passes a tube, the tube changes colour and sounds the related pitch.
Although the Fast-forward flashback clock has a 12-hours dial, the two phoenix feathers run on 24-hours clock speed. How time flies and how we cramp two days into one. The hurries and the worries, what urban folly. By adding to the clockwork a ‘fourth gear,’ which makes the small feather run counter-clockwise, going twice as fast forward is going twice as fast backward. When we think about the past, we nevertheless move on, irreversibly widening the distance...
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