electronics, tape machines, magnetic tape, wood, stainless steel
2026

artists: Benjamin Bacon, Vivian Xu

“Human beings, having created logical machines, have created a discontinuity with their own cultural regime.”

– Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeology: Method and Machine versus the History and Narrative of Media”, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013

Horologic, Greek, of or related to horologe or horology, the science of measuring time or the art of making instruments for indicating time.

– Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Hysteros, Greek, to come after.

– Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Horologic Hysteros is the second installment in the Horologic Series, following Horologic Solum. The work moves from previous explorations of media archive as memory prosthesis towards a more expanded understanding of history, deconstructed and examined through the lens of machine historicity. As German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst notes in his concept of micro-temporalities, contemporary technological media, or time-critical media, exists temporally at a micro-level beneath the threshold of human perception. Unlike time-based media that unfolds over time through narrative, time-critical media imposes its own intrinsic temporal order governed by the technical apparatuses’ internal logic autonomous from human culture. These micro-temporalities saturate today’s technological infrastructure, underpinning and mediating human experience and social and historical processes. 

The installation amplifies these micro-temporalities by spatially constructing a soundscape through recursive signal transfer, looping, sampling, phasing, and the entropic process of material degradation and decay, wherein machine time gradually envelops and subsumes human time within the exhibition space. Within the installation, history is not narrated and recounted but quantified and counted down, presented to the audience through a procession of moments made tangible through sound. This is a history of the system, a rhythmic history, a history inscribed by the machine. Human bodies synchronize with this history, captured in its speed and tempo. Suspended within this temporal space, we enter into the machine. The piece brings into focus the promises of a techno-future and asks: is this utopia?

The installation constructs an abstract soundscape of industrial decay:

1)  Signal: Radioactive emissions within the exhibition space are captured through Geiger counter sensors, translating invisible environmental radiation into the foundational pulse of the system.

2)  Loop: The signal feeds into a three-layer tape loop system, each layer cycling through time at its own interval, constructing a recursive, self-sustaining temporal architecture.

3)  Tempo: The tempo is not composed but extracted — determined by the frequency of radioactive decay events, imposing an inhuman rhythm onto the exhibition space.

4)  Decay: As the tape loops, the physical degradation of the medium becomes audible — a material entropy written into the sound, the system consuming itself over time.

5)  Sampling: Each pass through the loop samples the previous, accumulating generations of signal degradation, wherein the history of the system's own deterioration becomes the composition. 

6)  Pattern: From entropy, pattern emerges — repetition and deviation producing a rhythmic structure that is simultaneously mechanical and unstable, ordered and in collapse.

7)  Impression: Finally, this symphony of collapse is impressed on paper, the machine inscribes its own history.

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This work was commissioned by the Power Station of Art for the Techno Worlds exhibition. ​​