Fabula Tempo is a city obsessed with time. The city, like any other city, has its clocks but to the outsider many may seem illegible. Some move very slowly. Some calendars look like clouds. Some time pieces align while others seem to always be in argument. This city’s deep engagement with time is something more profound and complex than a singular orientation toward the ticktock of the clock.

It began ages ago when the mayor received a gift. A simple beautiful clock… a seemingly perfect object of engineering from a land full of perfectly engineered things.

The clock, however, proved to be running fast and a tiny ripple in the fabric of the city began.

The mayor was a curious and obsessive character and he could not let go of the aberration of his gift. It should have been a perfect and infallible device for the telling of time. He kept pulling at threads. He followed his questions about relativity, gravity, perception, experience, and the question of what now actually meant.
Slowly, the mayor’s understanding of the world and how it was organized unraveled. As it became undone, questions and debates about the nature of time spread through out the city and it upended much of how the government of the day functioned. Eventually, time in Fabula Tempo became unstable and the people of the city began to see things differently.

Some feared a descent into chaos lay ahead. When even the time of day was up for debate, how could we make a lunch date never mind make a city run. Thankfully, Fabula Tempo did not descend into chaos, but it was particular… very particular, and its particularity turned into its success and a whole tourist economy grew around the diversity of times the city had cultivated. There where so many types of time here that people could not experience elsewhere. They come, and leave their watches and their phones in the hotels, and wander the streets in search of new times, old times, lost time, wasted time, extra time, good times, tough times, interesting times…

Recently, a new leader has been elected and is hoping for great things for the city. Reflecting on the path Fabula Tempo has taken, the mayor believes the city can offer something unique to the world. After their election, they started a city wide effort to take all of their history, all of their questions and ideas and come up with a new way to tell time.

You are visiting the city at a fascinating moment.

Fabula Tempo is consumed by the question of the moment. Can we offer the world a new representation of time? And tonight, a televised debate… a common moment of discussion on the nature of time. Let’s watch…

A transcript of this debate is available here.

Go here now to watch a screening on artists manipulating our temporal realities with cutting, looping, expanding and compressing time.

Are you lost?