Timeline (2004) is based on the device used in packages like Adobe Premiere and Macromedia for sequencing images, video clips, and sound files. There are many reasons why the metaphor of the timeline appealed to me. First, there are the obvious associations with time and aging, and this work began as a poem about getting old. But the timeline also embodies a particular kind of time–that is, it lets you replay, much as we replay for ourselves the images and words that make up our lives. On the one hand there is the sense that there’s a continuous flow, a whole video that makes up our lives, but on the other there’s the sense of the fragmentary and the random. Timeline is a metaphor for this contradiction. The user creates a poem out of random acts, i.e. by selecting images from a database of images each of which is associated with a few lines from the original poem. The associations are not known in advance. But more importantly, one doesn’t know the shape of the original poem which, like our ideologies and abstractions, may turn out, in the long run, not to be relevant to the poem that one creates out of the particulars of one’s own experience. So, the poem is in effect many poems, capable of being manifested in an enormous range of image sequences; with the Timeline software you can play and replay your combinations and recombinations of image and text.
Note: Timeline requires a minumum of IE 5.5, Netscape 7.1, or Mozilla 1.5.