In Yuri Pattison’s colocation, time displacement, a roving camera navigates the interior of Pionen, a former civil defence center in the White Mountains Södermalm borough of Stockholm. Built in the 1970s to protect essential government functions from nuclear strike, it is now a datacentre run by Bahnhof AB. The Pirate Bay & Wikileaks have both used Pionen for their colocation services, but the camera’s POV remains discreet on finer points like these, never fully disclosing the location it inhabits.

Disclosure of a different kind reaches the viewer via a speed reading technology, which displays captions of the online postings of John Titor, (purported) time traveller from the year 2036. The legend goes that Titor was sent back to the year 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100, needed to “debug” legacy computer programs in the time from which he came(which itself is a reference to the UNIX year 2038 problem), stopping off in the year 2000 for “personal reasons”.
One conspiracy suggests the John Titor character, diffused through Fantasy & Science Fiction internet forums and chat rooms, is an upcoming Disney franchise seeded into internet culture by it’s suspected creator.

Albert France-Lanord, the architect for Bahnhof, has referenced 1960s & ‘70s science fiction set design and cinematography (specifically the 1972 Universal Studios film Silent Running) as an inspiration for the design of Pionen. The effort to blend reality, period, and provenance is not lost on the formal aspects of the work. The video was shot in digital Super16, in full HD, using legacy Pentax Cosmicar lenses- lenses that are unable to resolve HD. The viewer is left with an image that is inextricably complicated by time.

With thanks to BAHNHOF AB, Sweden & the John Titor Foundation.

colocation, time displacement was originally commissioned by Temporary Arts Project (TAP) for Migrating Origins, a project curated by Warren Harper and James Ravinet.