You have been here before

3D-Animation, 2021

Magdalena Marie Friedl X Ruth Zimmermann

You are walking through a set of endless, identical corridors. After a while, words appear on the former empty walls, spelling the phrase „YOU HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE“.

With each pass, the letters in those words seem to have been rearranged - first only slightly, then rapidly. You are confused and feel uncomfortable.

Over time, you are not able to understand the meaning of those words anymore. You feel the panic rising in you. You walk faster. Your heart is beating strongly. You are trapped. You are breathing heavily.

Time seems to not move forward the same way as it used to. You are exhausted. How long have you been here already? You become frustrated, as you don’t know the answer. There seems to be no way out. Everything starts to fall apart.

This video project is about the sensation of the loss of chronoception (a temporal illusion, which is the distortion in the perception of time), after a prolonged period of time spent in a confined space - how time becomes meaningless, and everything feels repetitive.