Research: Remixing Thick Time
Using art to rethink our experience of time.
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Research summary
Remixing Thick Time is a collaborative project between Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manifold Lab (formerly known as the Biosocial Lab) and Whitworth Young Contemporaries.
The collaboration began with Manifold Lab’s interest in the work of the Whitworth Young Contemporaries, who bring young people together through a diverse range of artistic practices and the creation of dynamic events.
The project aimed to rethink our awareness of time, including how art can create an atmosphere that allows us to move outside of linear time, how we can experience time simultaneously and differently, and how factors such as memories, light and scent can affect our sense of time.
Inspired by William Kentridge’s ‘Thick Time’, which explored the formation of global histories through memory and the imagination, Remixing Thick Time questions our sense of time as we become sensitive to the change in light, sound, space, colour, movement, feeling and form.
Both the Manifold Lab and the Whitworth Young Contemporaries worked together over a series of workshops to explore the function of art as an instrument to alter or produce different kinds of sense of time.
Hosted in the Whitworth Art Gallery’s Grand Hall, Remixing Thick Time culminated in a multi-sensory exhibition, creating an immersive experience for visitors using audio-visual works, remixed sounds, animations and biosensing projections.
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Projects like this really benefit young people’s mental health – engaging with art and creativity and using digital methods to draw them in is a really effective way of helping.