Baume & Mercier: Time Warped

An immersive installation commissioned by the Swiss watch manufacturer Baume & Mercier about time and perception.

The philosopher Juan David García Bacca once said: to understand a society just look how they measure and control their time. Time defines our pace of life. It controls our routines and habits - it controls how we define our world and our surroundings. Today, the way we interpret and control time is responsible of some threads that we face in our society.

This is a critical new phase in the history of the Earth, when for the first time ever, natural forces and human forces become intertwined, so that the fate of the one determines the fate of the other.

While reading Timer over time, an essay written by Eduardo Vicente Navarro, I came up with the following fact: even though time is considered a Newtonian variant (continuous, constant, irreversible and directional), the origins of smallest unit of time (the second) probably has a psychological and physiological origin: the human heart-beat.

Time warped is an immersive installation that explores alternative perceptions of time from other living beings through the sound of their heartbeats. The spectator is invited to manipulate their interpretation of time while listening to the repetitive sound of heart-beat frequencies from different animals, including reptiles, aves or mammals, some of them already extinct . The installation is not only a sensorial experience - it is also an opportunity to understand our surroundings in a higher level.