Time after time

Artist & Writer Chi Tran
Curator Audrey Thomas-Hayes

Time after time is a story about two souls after the moment of death. In this film, the bardo (the state of intermediate existence) is imagined as a neutron star, where two ghosts live and have become the keepers of this star. It is both a prayer and premonition of how a shared afterlife may feel, sound, and appear.

Here, the film is presented alongside a new text, In Another Side of Time, written from the perspective of the film’s two characters. The text functions as both an origin tale for the film’s setting, as well as a foreshadowing of what might follow – a breaking of dimensional symmetry and the crystallising of the star these ghosts inhabit.

Chi Tran, Time after time, 2022. Video, 10:21 min. Written and directed by Chi Tran. Narrated by Hung Tran. Courtesy the artist.

In Another Side of Time

My favourite time is in time’s other side, its other identity, the kind that collapses and sometimes reappears, and sometimes doesn’t.

— Etel Adnan, ‘Shifting the Silence’, 2020

1.
The concept of symmetry was recognised by the organisms on this star for millions of years before it became mathematically defined. Some histories trace the origins of symmetry to the ancient study of crystals and their geometry. Others trace it to the association between symmetry and forms of nature — ‘nature’ as, in the broadest sense of the word, the physical world and the phenomena within it. For example, a crystal, a leaf, a DNA helix.

2.
At the beginning of this side of time, the universe was deemed perfectly symmetrical — one could pass freely through any and all dimensions. At that time, gravity, light, elasticity were all part of the same string multiplet. This symmetry, however, caused star-wide material instability. It could never have lasted.

The arrival of the first soul broke this star’s dimensional symmetry. It was a fateful event, but phase transitions are nothing new. The symmetry breaking was not only logical but fundamental to this star’s development. After the symmetry broke, light became tangible. Souls learned how to collect, transport and rearrange light, while maintaining its elasticity and structure. Souls became capable of inventing new words to say who they were, and what they meant. Language became pliable, star-wide.

3.
On this star, we reside in another side of time. Time has many sides, which is to say, it passes differently for everyone and everything. We come to this star after our souls leave the Earth, to care for the animals and the garden that were here before us. Back on Earth, we would refer to this place as the most mysterious class of neutron star. Since we came to inhabit it, we have become its keepers.

4.
The structure of this star is Sun-like, meaning it will eventually crystallise at some point in its evolution. This star is high in density, its core a fluid, and as this fluid solidifies, it may turn into a crystal in its final stages of life.

We do not know what will happen to life on this star, to the chickens, the bees, or the dynamics of sound.

Within its complexity, there is a beauty to change that is not immediately perceptible. Change which realises itself over time, that which requires its symmetry to be broken via a new event, an action, a meeting. Change that calls for futurity (in any side of time) in order to be studied and understood.

When the symmetry broke, the change was not recognised for what it was.

It happened and the souls merely observed the star slowly moving, plates gently shifting, it was all tectonic.

Text by Chi Tran.