'Time travel for dummies' is a body of work inspired by Clifford Simak's book 'Time is the simplest thing'. In this Hugo Award-nominated book published in 1961, a telepath accidentally acquires a powerful alien consciousness and must run to escape corporate assassins and angry mobs. This is a richly imagined tale of prejudice, corporate greed, oppression, and, ultimately, transcendence.

The artworks present a landscape of the distant world where the main character of the book Shepherd Blaine encounters an enormous pink creature. The otherness of the being is complete, however it surprisingly telepathically says

'Hi, pal. I trade with you my mind.'

in Blaine's thoughts before the human is jerked back to earth as his time on the planet comes to an end as part of a routine procedure of this expedition.

Now back in the familiar Earthly Mexico office with buzzing machinery all around, Blaine is immediately aware that his body now hosts two conscious entities. And he'd soon find out his hitchhiker would teach him all about Time and how it works and can be controlled at will.

---

Simak's works are extremely effective in establishing a world where highly fantastic events are presented as a routine part of society. This allows the story to unfold in a way that the reader can recognize the inherent human determinants of behaviours and characteristics regardless of the fantastic landscape. 


The sharp contrasting colours of the artworks and the chaotic merge and splurge of shapes on the pieces express the constant struggle within each human between the spectrally dualistic emotions and thoughts that live within the human experience at any given moment.
 

Each moment is the building block of a lifetime.

These moments live in the artworks in the shape of pixels which in essence, make up the entirety of the pieces.

Our own perception of each moment elongates or shrinks time in our subjective experience, however each time frame is exactly the same length and shape as the others. Herein lies the secret of time travel - if we’re able to grasp the moment in its subjective existence, we’re able to time-travel through life and space at will.


One can begin to grasp that essentially, context will only house what humans already hold inside and are dominated by - their internal landscapes of fear or greatness, greed and prejudice or ability to extend oneself to help another, discrimination against others and the desire to put oneself in another's shoes.


Human life will always be dominated by conflicting and contrasting emotions, thoughts and urges. This body of work's purpose is to remind us that these are always present at the same time within us and aren't separate. Contrary, they are in fact quantities of the same characteristics and it's our conscious or unconscious choices that make them change and realign with our internal landscapes and the kind of world we wish to create and be a part of.

---

︎ Exhibited at NFT Paris [Paris]︎︎︎ and You Topia [London and New York] RSPV︎︎︎

---

The artworks were initially created physically via methods of abstract expressionism.

Materials used: latex, spray paint, cardboard, newspaper, plastic bags, industrial mesh.

Then, the scanned artworks were given a generative digital treatment to present a fine pixelated effect visible when an artwork is viewed in detail.

'not the sight itself'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'He settled back in the seat and turned his head toward the window, watching the lighted streets slide past and above the streets the massive, terraced blocks of buildings that were Fishhook. And marveled at the unfailing wonder of this sight which after all the years never failed to thrill him. Knowing as he thought it that it was not the sight itself, for there were grander in the world, but the fabulous significance which fell like a mantle on the city.

For here, he thought, in fact, if not in name, was the capital of Earth. Here lay the hope and greatness of the future, here was the human link with other worlds deep in outer space.

And he was leaving it.'

'something's dwelling place'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'Shepherd Blaine sensed that he was in some sort of house, or, if not a house exactly, in something's dwelling place. For there was an orderliness and a sense of proportion and of form which did not occur in nature, even in an alien nature on the planet of an unknown star far removed from Earth.

His treads left no tracks upon the floor as they had left tracks upon the sand dunes before he had come upon this dwelling place, if that was what it was. The wind was a whisper only as compared with the howling of the desert storm through which he'd forged for hours.

And yet the stars still shone and the distant sun was there, dim as it might be, and so this place he had stumbled on was certainly no enclosure.

Blaine moved forward slowly with all his sensors out, turned up to full capacity, and the sense of 'house' persisted and, a little after that, the sense of life as well.'

'rather than a person'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.

And in this a parry* or a community of parries was no different from a normal person or a community of normal persons. Paranormal ability, after all, did not change the person. It merely gave him a chance to become a better person.'

*parry = person with paranormal abilities

'abilties are simply manifestations of a wholeness of the mind'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

"You mean you may have other abilities you are not aware of?"

"Look, Father, in paranormal kinetics you have a certain mental capacity. First, you are the simple things, the easy things--the telepath, the teleport, the huncher. You go on from there--or there are some who do. You grow. Some stop growing after a time and others keep on growing. Each of these abilities is not a separate ability; the abilities themselves are simply manifestations of a wholeness of the mind. They are, lumped together, the mind working as it always should have worked, even from the very first, if it had had its chance."

'a single point in time'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it--and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and, the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and viewpoint of men who'd long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life--life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were
carefully erased.'

'jumbed bits of cosmic information'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'Blaine left the window and went back to sit down on the bunk and he was remembering now. But the memories were dim and they came from far away and from very long ago and one could not be sure at once if they were truly memories or if they were no more than quaint imagining.

For there were many planets and many different peoples and a host of strange ideas and there were jumbled bits of cosmic information that lay all helter-skelter like a pile of ten billion heaped-up jackstraws.'

'haphazard shape of a surface'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'The floor was hard and smooth and of a bright blue color and very easy for him to roll along. There were forms scattered here and there that might have been furniture or equipment or artifacts of some aesthetic value and they all were blue as well and the shape of them was not the wild, haphazard shape of a surface carved by wind or sun or weather, but the clean-cut lines, straight or curved as they might be, of functional apparatus.

And yet the stars still shone and the distant sun was there, dim as it might be, and so this place he had stumbled on was certainly no enclosure.'

'aeons of screaming time'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'It was himself, he knew, in which the strangeness lay--almost as if he were another, as if he were only half himself, and the other half of him were tenanted by an unknown being that was backed against a wall and spat in overriding fear and mewled in loneliness.

He clawed his way upward from the well, and his mind fought in frantic urgency against the mewling strangeness in him even as he sensed that it was no use to fight, that the strangeness was a thing that had come to live with him and be a part of him so long as he existed.

He rested for a moment from the climbing and tried to sort out himself, but he was too many things and in too many places and it was utterly confusing. He was a human being (whatever that might be) and he was a scurrying machine and he was an alien Pinkness sprawling on a bright blue floor and he was a mindlessness that fell through aeons of screaming time which finally figured out, when one nailed down the mathematics of it, to the fraction of a second.

And finally he knew.'

'you feel obscenely naked, with just your mind and not your body'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

"No, it isn't magic. Once you understand it, once you get the feel of it, it is clear and simple and it becomes a part of you. It is as natural as breathing and as easy as falling off a log. I would imagine--"

"I would think," said Father Flanagan, "that it is unnecessary to go into the mechanics of it. Could you tell me how it feels to be on another star?"

"Why," Blaine told him, "no different than sitting here with you. At first--the first few times, that is--you feel obscenely naked, with just your mind and not your body. . . ."

"And your mind wanders all about?"

"Well, no. It could, of course, but it doesn't...'


✪ Exhibited at 'YOU TOPIA' - a group exhibition curated by VerticalCrypto Art in collaboration with The NFT Gallery in London and New York

'beliefs in time outlive their usefulness’

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

"I take it, Mr. Dalton, you read a lot of history."

"Yes, Mr. Blaine, I do. I am particularly fond of--"

"Then, perhaps, you've noticed one other thing as well. Ideas and institutions and beliefs in time outlive their usefulness. You'll find it in page after page of all our history--the world evolves and the people and their methods change. Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo. . . ."

'functional apparatus'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'The floor was hard and smooth and of a bright blue color and very easy for him to roll along. There were forms scattered here and there that might have been furniture or equipment or artifacts of some aesthetic value and they all were blue as well and the shape of them was not the wild, haphazard shape of
a surface carved by wind or sun or weather, but the clean-cut lines, straight or curved as they might be, of functional apparatus.

And yet the stars still shone and the distant sun was there, dim as it might be, and so this place he had stumbled on was certainly no enclosure.'

✪ Exhibited at NFT Paris 2023

'flecks of jetsam in a frothy tide'

4k png
BoryaXYZ © 2023

'And what had happened to that mind the alien on the distant star had exchanged with him?

He sought for it again and he could not find it, but he did find traces of it; he found the spoor of it, tiny, muddy footprints that went across his brain; he found bits and pieces that it had left behind--strange, chaotic memories and straws of exotic, disconnected information that floated like flecks of jetsam in a frothy tide.

He did not find it, but he found the answer to its going--the instinctive answer that suddenly was there. The mind had not gone and left him. It had, rather, finally, become a part of him. In the forge of fright and terror, in the chemistry of danger, there had been a psychologic factor that had welded the two of them together.'