Universal Time: An Executive Summary is a video that compresses the history of the standardization of human experience into a nine-minute montage, to the oceanic soundtrack of a MIDI loop of the first seconds of Van Halen’s “Right Now.” Universal Time: An Executive Summary was commissioned by Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum_6 in 2012, as part of the project PowerPointing™ Your Creative Medium Potential, curated by Victoria Camblin. When played on a loop on an antiquated PC at Art Dubai’s Forum-Forum (a “multimedia repository”), the video was accompanied by the following text. (Click here to view the video.)

“Who are we? How do the standardization of experience and the rationalization of society act as limiting and liberating forces? Why is it so difficult to model water graphically? What are tools good for? How does one locate the transcendent in compression? Can karaoke be a form of pure, unmediated communication? Is the 3D bar-graph the ultimate technology? Yes and no.”

Below are selected stills from the video.