This started out as an experiment about time and space, there was a message hidden in the footage that I wasn’t aware of at the time – while I was experimenting during the pandemic, the TV was talking away to itself in the background, when I started to edit the video footage over a year later, I could hear the faint voice of a narrator talking about viruses, I turned the sound up and the voice became part of the piece, I almost deleted it, but then I made the connection with the video and viruses spreading in a continuous cycle over time.

As happy accidents go, I thought this worked really well, so I added ‘Agent Smith’s’ voice afterwards for an extra dimention. I now have a piece about time, space and viruses.

If we can think of a tiny increment of time as the tiniest moment in time – that would be the present, which quickly becomes the past with no duration, so the present seems to occupy no space in time.

The Buddha is occupying the present on a continuous cycle as well as the past at the same time. My camera is constantly recording the Buddha which feeds the image into a projector which is projecting the image of the Buddha back at itself in a continuous cycle (similar to sonic feedback).

The repeating images of the Buddha on the wall behind the actual Buddha will go on into infinity for eternity, rendering the Buddha constantly in the present and in the past at the same time.

The suffering experienced in the contemporary coronavirus pandemic may seem to be very distant from the Buddha’s message which was delivered over two thousand years ago, but the teaching is as relevant today as it was then – “humanity itself is the cause of its own suffering”.

A Buddhist monk recently said that the coronavirus is a “grave warning from nature to mankind”