TTY2020
Pierre Depaz and Pat Shiu
Technology frames our perception of time. For most, life under quarantine, has correlled even more of our public and private lives into digital spaces. Abruptly, we find ourselves sitting in our physical confines, looking upon the world almost exclusively through digital windows. As days pass, time itself seems to fall out of pace.
TTY2020 came out of a desire to log this period of collective displacement—a time in which time itself feels broken. Sitting by a bay window, a dot-matrix printer has put one character on the page every second, since its installation on April 12th 2020. Every minute, it completes a line, and moves on to the next.
Via the website any visitor can view all previously printed text, and enter new text to be printed, Until the moment it is sent to print, all text is readable only by its author, so she drafts in private. To everyone else on the page, her input is displayed as grey blocks. Every second, as the print head moves forward, it sets in ink each character in its path, rendering it public to all.
Second by second, page by page, an open record is produced. Our timekeeper, an Okidata Microline 421 printer will tick on until we find our way back to the Normal, and its work becomes obsolete.
Pierre Depaz (b. ████, France) and Pat Shiu (b. ████, Hong Kong) create works about loneliness, humor and technological absurdity. An oft-revisited subject in their works is emotional connections as experienced through the constraints of the technologies that mediate them. Most of their works solicit interaction, and straddle digital and physical spaces. For years, they’ve lived in separate cities, and collaborate almost entirely remotely.
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