ABSTRACT
For centuries the arts were divided into the spatial arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) and the temporal arts (poetry, music, dance, theater). In the age of industrialization, time became money, and the invention of astonishingly fast mechanical wheelwork, steam engines, and means of transport mesmerized the public. By the turn of the twentieth century, visual artists had become fascinated by speed, movement, and moving images and were starting to explore the realm of time.
Today, kinetic sculpture, performance art, video art, time-based earth art, computer art, interactive media art, robotic art, or virtual reality art are established art forms that visualize their ideas in space and time and use time as an artistic medium.
This paper hypothesizes that some time-based art visualizes time in the form of movement, process, or action and to a certain extent, also transforms time into space which might alter our perception of time.
As an example, I would like to look at video art from the 1970s when artists had just discovered the new video technology. Especially these early video art pieces show that many artists at that time were fascinated by video as a new medium that could manipulate time. For the viewer, the results were not only surprising temporal experiences but sometimes also novel explorations of space-time correlations as well.
