As an interactive multimedia installation, the Zeitmaschine (time machine) is hidden in the massive belly of an advertising pillar which is located in the public space and which does not give the slightest clue about its actual purpose. When the visitor enters the machine through a hidden door, he begins a journey through time, consisting of videos, sounds and light effects that take him from the creation of our universe to the distant days of its demise.

On the basis of a modular system, a panorama is created consisting of changing video overlays, sound collages and LED compositions. The form of the advertising pillar functions as a carrier that encloses a space (of time), while – layer by layer – the traces of the present accumulate on its outside. The bright white of the (de)collaged pictorial ground changes into nighttime black, whose only illumination comes from LEDs which, from far away, remind us of distant galaxies.

In the center of the machine is a wheel, as round as the dial of a watch and as shining as a mechanical system for measuring time. If the visitor sits down in front of it, he can transport himself through time by using the force of his body, clockwise and counter-clockwise, into the past and into the future. The round time frames mounted at eye level give him a view out. The Zeitmaschine brings space time into harmony with man’s own time. It thus happens quite frequently that visitors forget their earthly time measurement and wrongly guess the time of their trip.