Hatchlands Park, National Trust, Surrey, October-November 202313:00 minutes, colour, Documentation of installation
Showcased at Beyond Conference 23
https://beyondconference.org/b23/showcase/spectral-transmissions-time-out-of-joint/
A moving image montage of the audio visual installations developed by the Spectral Transmissions Research Unit, an immersive heritage interpretation project conducted in collaboration with and commissioned by Hatchlands Park, National Trust, Surrey.
“Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint”
Hamlet, Act 1 scene 5 William Shakespeare
“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
“I refuse to acknowledge time.”
Maria Carey
In October 2023 timed to coincide with the celtic festival of Samhain a liminal threshold, where and when the boundary between this world and others is believed to become blurred Hatchlands Park NT in Surrey played host to “Time out of Joint” the latest in a series of hybrid audio visual installations that seek to invert the established notions of augmented reality as a digital phenomena that seems to alter reality on its own terms within its confines, but as yet struggles to reach out and inhabit the world beyond the limits of it’s screens.
What is happening here is something immersive and entangled. A hybrid collage of 21st century imaging technology and Victorian stage craft presents an immersive and haunted experience of a stately home in which time and space merge and slip. A great accumulation of ghosts where the future seems no more than a memory, everything that was directly lived is now haunted and what was once proven can now only be imagined as a four dimensional temporal overlay of reality, that raises questions about the histories of these houses and the objects accumulated within them, and tests the values that set the “boundary between human-made signs and non-human things, and also between living and dead matter, between a subject with a conscious interiority, and mere objects who (seemingly) lack such a quality.”