The Distillation of Time

As humans, we always perceive time in different ways and try to manufacture products from it. In Tavistock and Gordon Square, there are many memorials. A memorial is set up a period of time after the incidence or the death of a person. During that time lag, people access, evaluate, and make the decision for what is “worth” remembering, and what is the best form of remembrance, this is similar to the process of distillation. Memorials are products from this distillation of the past.

 

In Tavistock Square, there is a memorial in form of a Ginkgo Tree. It is planted by Laxmi Mall Singhvi with the presence of Ray Adamson in remembrance of the poet William Butler Yeats. Laxmi Mall Singhvi continued to plant trees all over London “in remembrance of” someone while his actual intention is to be remembered.

 

We aim to create a machine that abstract leaf colors of the Ginkgo leaves in the same way that we distillate time. The stand consists of completely natural materials from the park, while man-made materials are used for the mechanism and vessel on top. This symbolizes how the initial process of distillation is completely artificial, which will be kept in the vessel for the duration of 1082 minutes (18 hours). This is the same as the days from when Singhvi first started planting trees to when this tree is planted. The alcohol in the vessel will then be slowly released drop by drop. There will be 7759 drops of alcohol (around 400ml), equivalent to the days from the tree being planted to the day the machine is going to operate. The liquid will then be dropped on to a rock collected in the park, and then flow down the side onto a paper. The liquid will erode the rock just by a little bit, showing the effect of human articulations in nature. Since time still goes on no matter what humans try to do, the “receiving” rock is not changed by a lot and will just continue to be the rock.

 

This machine demonstrates the process of a trial to manipulate the natural time by artificial force, but in the end not leaving any trace, which symbolizes the paradox of humans trying to gain control of the nature but fail to do so, and the stably changing, in some ways “everlasting”, quality of time.