Wholphin

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Directed by Roderick Coover
Written by Deb Olin Unferth

Liner Notes:

It is TIME at a street corner in London… A collaboration between filmmaker Roderick Coover and writer Deb Unferth, this short marks the textual disintegration of the speaking clock in an unnerving portrait of technology, power, and the urban environment.

You arrive in The Theory of Time Here waiting at a street corner in front of St Pancras Station, London… You are waiting on technology; waiting on cars to stop and trains to start; waiting for a light to change. Motion, movement, thought, and tone are nervous threads of a simple but suspended desire: a pedestrian longing. You, too, waiting on the street corner, are a marker in the urban clockwork. You hear the recorded sounds of a speaking clock; at the tone the time will be… But something is wrong. The words begin to jumble and become confused. An experience of actuality dissolves into an abstracted recognition of the technological language of your halting condition.

Whatever choices the humans make are constrained by–and expressed within the conditions of–the powerful forces of technology. These forces are expressed through convention. They may approach total disintegration, yet somehow, perhaps through convention, they right themselves, and begin again.

The Theory Of Time Here is distributed by the Video Data Bank, Chicago, www.vdb.org

Biographies

Roderick Coover’s most recent works include the interactive series, “Unknown Territories”, the Oulipian video-poetry series, “Currency”, the adaptation, “Gerald’s Party, a film for live radio”. Visit www.roderickcoover.com and www.unknownterritories.org for details.

Deb Olin Unferth’s recent fictions include the novel “Vacation” and the short story collection “Minor Robberies”, both published by McSweeney’s.

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