TIME ANIMALS 
2021

two-channel HD film with sound, 12m

Commissioned by curator Kristin Hussey at Medical Museion and Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), Copenhagen, DK

Soundtrack composed and performed by Jim Slade

The World Is In You, curated by Medical Museion, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2021

Screened at Bloom Festival, Copenhagen, 2023 followed by a conversation with associate professor Zach Gerhart-Hines. 

Time Animals explores the study of time in the body through the mundane and surreal experiences of chronobiologists. Filmed in the laboratories of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), the film was developed in collaboration with scientists working in the Centre, who often work around the clock in order to study the biology of circadian rhythms. In the process of studying these rhythms, they often disrupt their own.

Following one scientist through an imagined 24-hour circadian collection, the film plays with the dualities of day and night, activity and rest, nature and technology, synchrony and desynchrony. The two channel display and the title ‘Time Animals’ playfully evoke the tension between the scientists’ ability to control time perception in the lab and the needs of their biological bodies to rest, eat and sleep.

Developed during the Z-Time Project