The Khronos Projector — by Alvaro Cassinelli — is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

There are many ways to visually explore the spatio-temporal volume generated by a movie; most of them result from cutting the spatio-temporal volume by a two-dimensional surface. The usual way of visualizing video content, consist on showing consecutively each image of the sequence. In other words, the intersecting surface is a plane that remains always perpendicular to the time arrow. Now, for instance, by intersecting the spatio-temporal volume by planes that are not perpendicular with the time axis, the resulting image will show a spatio-temporal gradient. Of course, there have been already many works and art-works that develop on such ideas (see for instance [2, 3, 4 and 5], or check this website by Golan Levin for a more complete, chronologically ordered and up-to-date “informal catalog” on slit-scan artworks [13]). See also [1] for an interesting short essay on the representation of Time and Space in western classic, modern and contemporary art. The essay also includes some references to the latest interactive installations dealing with the subject.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, the Khronos Projector is the first Art-Installation enabling the interactive shaping of an arbitrarily complex spatio-temporal cutting surface thanks to a dedicated tangible and “sensual” human-machine interface, and thus giving the user a strong feeling of being actually sculpting the space-time “substance” with its own hands. More >>