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Artists

Joes Koppers & Susann Lekås

OPTIONALTIME / Public expanse

In the course of the exhibition De stedelijke conditie / The Urban Condition, the work OPTIONALTIME / public expanse will be realised in the new city centre of Almere. Joes Koppers and Susann Lekås developed the work OPTIONALTIME in 2002 for the exhibition Nonlinear Editing in Museum De Paviljoens. In this interactive installation, visitors could watch a short film of approximtely two minutes, that offered them different experiences of time.

OPTIONALTIME / public expanse is an interactive film with the public space as its stage. A glass screen at the Urban Entertainment Centre serves as the projection screen. The film is set in the same location and is a mixture of reality and fiction.

The visual archive is compiled and fed in three ways: with images of three fictitious inhabitants of Almere; with footage of real inhabitants of Almere, shot during a series of organised live events; and with images of the audience and passers-by. The screen projections react to the people present on the work’s ‘stage’ and to their behaviour. This artwork shows how people claim a spot in the public space and how they relate to their surroundings. 'OPTIONALTIME makes the user of the public space visible and plays with our illusions (or possibly wishes) about our personal influence on our surroundings.’—1. ‘OPTIONALTIME is a whisper-game of how we invent and reinvent our identity on the stage of public space.’—2. The artists see time as the ‘most central navigation system in our society and as the measuring instrument that creates the concept of the future’. For them, rendering time tangible is a means of experiencing the future: ‘OPTIONALTIME is a way of experiencing time that makes no distinction between the moment just passed, the present and the (concept) of the future.’—3

—1 Joes Koppers & Susann Lekås, OPTIONALTIME/ public expanse, sketch proposal for Stadscentrum Almere, september 2005, p.3
— 2 1ibid, p.2
—3 usemedia.com/optionaltime

Joes Koppers / Susann Lekås—b. 1976—Sittard—1973—Taby—Sweden

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