In Our Time

Irish artist Gerard Byrne’s video installation In Our Time unfolds, in real time, the inner workings of a recording studio during the golden era of analog radio. 

On first look, the video has the familiar register of a period piece set in a meticulously recreated control-booth of a radio station of its day. However, the linear timeline of the broadcast—with its repetitions of commercial breaks, the lilt and timbre of the radio host’s voice, the classic pop, and the weather segments—slowly disengages and falls apart. Soon, the songs played are not those that have been announced, the station’s name sounds different, the news events skip from decade to decade, and all the while the band simply continues to tune-up. In this radio booth, where the repetition of broadcast rhythms dictates the consecutive daily events, the image and soundtracks appear to remain resolutely synchronous. But the gradual disconnection between what is seen and what is heard produces a surreal uncertainty around the fixity of time within the temporal monotony of the radio station.

In Our Time brings into focus not only the time of broadcast—its rhythms, in-jokes, and pop riffs—but reinforces the temporal reality in which we all exist, on the sublevel of our daily routine to the looping of political and historical cycles. The record might change, but our cultural and technological concept of time remains constant.