THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Temporal Experiments - Stratifications of Matter in the Spacetime Flow (1985)

The artistic practice known as "Temporal Experiments", initiated in 1985, radically subverts the traditional concept of the artwork as a completed, immutable entity. While the classical conception assumes that a work is created at a specific moment and remains forever identical to itself, this research introduces time as a constitutive element and co-author of the creative process. A work receives a title, a date and a time of completion, but this "completion" is only apparent: after one, three, five, ten or fifteen years, the artist may take it up again, add new elements, and once more record the exact moment of the intervention. Each temporal stratification thus becomes a visible trace of the passage of time, transforming the work into an organism that grows over the years, accumulating intervals and chronological distances. What emerges from this practice displays a striking correspondence with contemporary physics, not by derivation but by independent convergence. When a mark is added to a work after five years, a superimposition of different temporal moments is created that coexist within the same physical space. The work becomes a place where different times touch, stratify, and enter into dialogue. A fragment from 1986 can enter into a direct relationship with a fragment from 1989, and then both with a fragment from 2001, creating a temporal weave that challenges ordinary chronological linearity.

This artistic intuition resonates with the Einsteinian revolution of relativity, which demonstrated that space and time are not separate dimensions but form a four-dimensional continuum. Temporal Experiments materialize this interconnection through artistic practice, making perceptible what physics has formulated mathematically: time is not a neutral container but an active dimension that interlaces with space and matter. The research is not limited to painting or drawing on traditional supports. Certain installations use sunlight to inscribe temporal displacement: photosensitive materials change colour, density, and form depending on their exposure to sunlight, allowing the work to modify itself autonomously without direct intervention by the artist. The intensity and angle of sunlight are in constant flux due to the Earth’s rotation and its revolution around the Sun. An installation that records these variations is documenting cosmic movements, translating astronomical dynamics on a planetary scale into a visible form. The result is a work that bears the trace of the Earth’s movement through space, where time is rendered visible in its transformative action upon matter. The same principle governs the photographic documentation of a colony of mould expanding across a wall surface. The mould grows, transforms, and changes its morphology according to biological laws that escape human control. Documenting it at different moments means recording an autonomous process of transformation in which the work coincides with the very act of making visible the time acting upon organic matter. This is not representation in the classical sense: the artist does not paint a mould, but recognises in the mould itself a natural process worthy of artistic status. A similar approach characterizes the photographic documentation of a plant during its biological process of flowering and senescence. The artist does not create the vegetal organism, but chooses to render it visible as a temporal phenomenon, to confer artistic meaning on a process that normally escapes attention because it is too slow for immediate perception. This implies a radical shift: art no longer necessarily consists in the manual production of forms, but may consist in the capacity to recognise, select, and give visibility to processes that unfold independently of human intention. Creativity is acknowledged in natural phenomena, in chemical and physical processes, in biological dynamics. The artist becomes an observer and cataloguer of processes rather than a creator of objects, adopting an approach that recalls the scientific method: isolating, observing, documenting with rigour. The precision with which the date and time of each intervention are recorded is not a formal affectation but an essential conceptual element. This precision establishes exact spatiotemporal coordinates for every layer of the work. Each notation fixes a precise point at which an event – the artistic intervention – has taken place. The sum of these notations creates a temporal map of the work, a stratified chronology that makes it possible to reconstruct not only when but also at what temporal distance the interventions occurred. A work with notations five years apart tells a different story from a work with interventions spaced six months apart: the time of waiting, the time of maturation between one intervention and another becomes an integral part of its meaning. This means recognising and valorising the long durations of material, biological, existential processes – durations that cannot be accelerated without denaturing the phenomenon itself. A plant cannot grow in a second, mould does not spread in an hour, wood does not warp in a day.

The difference from traditional art is stark: whereas an ancient or contemporary artwork aspires to eternity, seeking to freeze a moment and render it immutable, Temporal Experiments embrace change as a constitutive element. They do not combat deterioration but document it; they do not fear transformation but incorporate it. The focus shifts from an aesthetics of the result to an aesthetics of process, from an art of the finished object to an art of continuous becoming. Traditional art seeks to minimise entropy – disorder, degradation – whereas Temporal Experiments acknowledge entropy as an inevitable and productive part of material reality. The practical implications are considerable. If a museum institution were to acquire a Temporal Experiment, what exactly would it be acquiring ? A physical object destined to change? The artist’s right to intervene on the work even after the transfer of ownership? The complete documentation of all the work’s previous states ? This opens up not only aesthetic questions but also legal, economic and conservation issues. How does one restore a work conceived to change ? How does one preserve something whose meaning resides precisely in not being preserved in its original form ? Traditional museology and conservation, founded on the idea of keeping works as close as possible to the moment of their creation, enter into crisis when faced with practices that make transformation their founding principle. This artistic practice positions itself within a cultural horizon in which the very notion of the work as a concluded entity has been called into question. However, Temporal Experiments display a specific character: they are not simply works that change or deteriorate – which inevitably occurs in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics – but works designed from the outset to be taken up again after years, where each resumption constitutes a fully intentional creative act, dated with precision. Temporal stratification is not a side effect of natural deterioration but the very content of the work, willed and programmed by the artist. The logical consequence of this practice is the concept of "spatiotemporal irreproducibility": every intervention on a work takes place within unique, non-repeatable spatiotemporal coordinates, rendering each moment of the work ontologically unrepeatable. The identity of the work no longer resides in a fixed form but in the temporal process that traverses it, in the continuity that links interventions separated by years or decades. Temporal Experiments offer a mode of experiencing time that does not pass through abstract conceptualisation but through the sensory perception of transformations, of chronological distances made visible in matter. In this sense, they constitute not only an artistic practice but also a cognitive instrument for investigating the physical nature of time and change through the direct experience of matter in transformation.

V R

Time changes space (Time experiments) from 1985 to 1989©. Cm 33x23, graphite on paper. Work carried out every year for 4 consecutive years. The trial ended on August 22, 1989 at 11:30 pm.

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