Mungo Thomson: Time Life

Mungo Thomson’s work uses and subverts the technologies of consumption and mediation to explore the interpenetration of subjectivity, perception, and cultural memory. His ongoing series of stop-motion videos, Time Life, compress how-to guides, reference encyclopedias, and production manuals into rapidly flickering moving images. These anthropological hallucinations, suspended between digital and analog worlds, are presented in distinct chapters, projected at monumental scale, and propelled by musical scores. On view here is Thomson’s newest cycle, volumes 8–16.

The artist first used the technique of stop-motion animation in 2009 to make Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970–), which catalogs the contents of his former Los Angeles gallerist’s Rolodex on Super 16mm film. Just as his choice of celluloid befit the era in which Leavin began her record of names and addresses, Thomson’s digital editing of the Time Life videos mimics the frame rate and percussive clatter of the world’s highest-speed robotic book scanners as they digitize publications for the internet. Mirroring the oversaturation of images and information characteristic to contemporary media culture, this body of work troubles the fantasy of stable, complete knowledge. The nine new videos portray subjects including a massive seashell collection, a hummingbird in flight, artists’ models from life-drawing books, wheel-thrown pottery, a chronological survey of three-dimensional objects made by humans since prehistory, a silent consideration of 1970s mime, a psychedelic view of rock microstructure from geology textbooks, a single candle burning down, and an encyclopedic guitar manual used as a musical score.

Thomson pairs these videos with new and existing soundtracks by John McEntire, Eiko Ishibashi, Lee Ranaldo, Mark Fell and Will Guthrie, and Jonny Rodgers, as well as a Foley score by Hollywood’s Paradise Sound Group and a new recording of György Ligeti’s 1962 “Poème Symphonique” as performed by Casey Cangelosi. Synthesizing sonic and visual rhythms, Thomson delivers immersive, somatic experiences that counter the alienations inherent in our digital culture. As art historian Hal Foster has written of Time Life, the combination of the music and the rapid cuts between images makes these works “physical—corporeal—in a way that resensitizes us rather than the opposite” to the way information flows around us, its movements indexing our changing world.