At the first edition of the game is up in 2007 (with the tagline You’re about to do something you shouldn’t) Antoine Schmitt presented his work Still Living. The visual installation showed graphs, pie charts, histograms, curves, etc. that moved and changed, shattering truths and making everything uncertain.
Schmitt’s new creation Time Slip is once again a form of software art. Time Slip is a news ticker receiving a continuous news feed in real-time. It bases itself on real news spread by official international press agencies. Schmitt doesn’t meddle with the content, but alters the grammatical tense of the items from past to future by adding the verb “will”. As a result, you get sentences like these: “The NASDAQ will drop 4.3 points today”, “ A plane crash in Madrid will kill 153 people”, “The Giants will crush the Red Sox 10 to 3”… Time Slip is a self-generating work: it is supplied with a permanent news feed and adjusts the verb tense with an algorithm. This way, the news ticker can go on forever by itself, without human interference.
The spectator reading the messages gets the impression that he is transported a few hours into the past, where somebody tells him what will happen in the near future.
For viewers who have not yet heard the news on the ticker, Time Slip feels like an fortune-telling oracle. One way or another, the work gives rise to feelings of discomfort, fear and powerlessness. It confronts the viewer with the control – or lack thereof – over his own fate in a universe where time and reason have become unstable concepts.
Antoine Schmitt is a French artist who works with new media and computer programming. His work was exhibited at prominent festivals such as Sonar in Barcelona, Ars Electronica in Linz, and Transmediale in Berlin. His work has won several prizes.
Antoine Schmitt’s project Time Slip is supported by the European regional development fund – in the framework of Transdigital 
and is developed with help from Timelab
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