An Information Technology Presentation

A la recherche du temps perdu/In Search Of Lost Time, SPACE, 20th March 12pm-6pm, entry free.

For a long time I would to go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have the time to tell myself: I'm falling asleep. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

The performance A la recherche du temps perdu--by Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic--takes the code literally. We are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust's novel. During the eight hours of a working day the human performers are playing computer. From the analog to the digital and back again: The sequence of events of the performance is described in this manual. Starting from the ASCII-Version of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu it is then re-coded into its underlying zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is CPU (the Central Processing Unit): She interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel. After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed. During the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.