Curated by Katherine Adams

Produced by Lara Edwards

What makes an incident, or an accident, appear as an event? Time Signature’s suite of projects center sound, rhythm, and voice as they consider how temporality is contoured in and by technological forms. Featured artists take an interest in processes and practices that have been omitted from official records; in histories on the verge of disappearance or at the edge of human awareness; and in the concealment of organic growth by artificial scaffolding.

In Time Signature, data are not kernels of information, but condensed happenings. Departing from the notion of a time signature in music, each work enacts a unique “signature” that scores—or un-scores—information. Rather than adhering to Western ideas of music notation, here time signatures work against the modes of knowledge-gathering that would suppress context-sensitivity. The featured projects generate data through moments of sensory immediacy, destabilizing whatever seemed naturalized, permanent, and unshakeable. As a whole, these artists focus on cadences that (un)model the variable and elusive.

Many works in Time Signature address gaps in records. Confronting erasure as the suppression of particular temporalities, they uncover the historical ghosts haunting archives and algorithms. Ekelekhera (Nitcha Tothong & Kengchakaj Kengkarnka)’s work engages with the history of gong ensembles in Thailand, offering visitors visual and sonic samples of these collective performance practices. Emphasizing sonic dispersion rather than musical fixity, the artists’ audiovisual work builds on digital renditions of various tuning systems and sound histories. Adrian Jones’s work offers a sensorial counter-history of Pittsburgh’s gentrified landscapes, through the story of the area’s first Black musicians’ union, Local 471. Across video, oral histories, and sound recordings, Jones peels back contemporary layers of real estate development to inscribe histories of Black expression in the present. Luca Lee engages with AI language learning in relation to queer identity and transition, building a dialogue with his younger self across time. In the process of training a past voice from within the present, Lee’s work highlights modes of speech that prevailing language models fail to absorb.

Entangling machinic and ecological forms, Kevin Peter He’s work explores contingent rhythms that blur the distinction between what is given and what is constructed. Beginning with reflections on the pruning of unruly flora into aestheticized, artificial forms, Peter He’s piece includes sculptures grafted onto the manicured plants within DEMO’s venue. Alongside this, a sensor-triggered video work processes viewers’ movements as changes in its scenes’ pacing and motion. Zavé Martohardjono’s meditative soundscape suggests a somatic connection to the “deep time” of geological change, orienting viewers away from the pace of human institutions. Accompanied by sculptures made from branches, and a video of performance rooted in intimacy with the land, Martohardjono’s soundscape encourages slowness and rest.

Each work in Time Signature offers a dynamic portrait of data as a mode of compressed experience—one in which movement, rhythm, and change are inherent. Every analytic has a rhythm.