We won a commission from The New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC to create a timeline of the year 1993 as part of their 2013 exhibition NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star. Given the sheer volume of content (around 1,200 events) we chose to work in video over a more traditional wall vinyl display. Since cable TV was the dominant form of media in the early 90’s we displayed the videos on monitors from the era. To reinforce the timeline, we created a 12-channel video installation, allotting one month per monitor.

Events were color-coded into four categories: US Affairs, World Affairs, Pop Culture and Arts and Sciences. We sourced 1993 TV content for each month from YouTube, making the timeline filled with primary content from the era. Each monitor contains a looping video of events from a given month, interspersed with tv channel-changing ‘fuzz’. All monitors play simultaneously and the variation of unique events creates unexpected overlaps between pop cultural references, global war and political disasters. In this regard, the timeline is both chronological and non-linear, and a true representation of the diversity of recorded history.

We designed an accompanying “TV Guide” publication, a takeaway for the first week of the NYC:1993 exhibition. It included the full written timeline in chronological order, printed on cheap newsprint to reference its predecessor.