Time Waterfall, 2017
Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computer systems, Tatsuo Miyajima (born 1957, Japan) creates supremely technological works centred on his use of LED counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious cycles from 1 up to 9 or from 9 down to 1, represent the journey from birth to death, the finality of which is symbolised by ‘0’, the void or zero point, which consequently never appears in his work.
Time Waterfall is a new work by Miyajima in which numbers tumble randomly and incessantly for eternity, with the different sizes of the numerals and varying speeds of descent representing the trajectory of individual lives within that continuum. The work presented in EVERYTHING AT ONCE is a sculptural realisation of Miyajima’s Time Waterfall, first created for the facade of a Hong Kong skyscraper, produced for the International Convention Centre commission in March 2016.