Eternity part 1: Do we have time for eternity?

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Midnight minus a hundred seconds… The apocalypse clock symbolizing the imminence of a catastrophe was brought forward to midnight minus 100 seconds in 2020. This tool, managed by American scientists including 13 Nobel Prize winners, was created during the Cold War to raise awareness about the risk of the end of the world, arbitrarily defined at Midnight.

There is no shortage of signs alerting us to climate change. Scientists have warned us through numerous modelings, replacing our oracles and prophecies with potential scenarios. And yet the contemporary situation is one of a threshold where nothing seems to have changed and where everything could suddenly reach tipping point.

Witnessing these crises, the artists put the future and its forecast at the heart of their reflection. In this first part, Eternity explores our reactions to these potential changes and the questions that arise from them. What attitudes are we going to adopt? Are we powerless or can we influence the future? Can we repair Nature through technology and science and gain greater control over the Earth?

“Man lacks time for eternity” Nicolas Berdaieff told us in ‘L’Homme et la Machine’ in 1933. How to think about time is at the heart of our current challenges, the acceleration of technologies promises to transform the world at a rate that no past extrapolation could have imagined. While it is difficult to envisage the afterwards, the artists question our present behavior in the face of modernity, technology, its power and its infinite progress.  They open up new narratives about progress, extrapolating some of them, and provoking a displacement so that we can take action and not simply place our only hope on the cycle of passing time. What should we do with the remaining time?

An exhibition produced by CHRONIQUES, Biennale of Digital Imagination, a SECONDE NATURE and ZINC conception, with the support of the city of Aix-en-Provence.

Curator: Mathieu Vabre
Associate curator: Wu Dar-Kuen

Programming committee: Manon Desplechin, Marylou Bonnaire
Scenography: Emilie Fouilloux
Technical direction: Philippe Machemehl