Dr. Lily Hibberd

Lily Hibberd is an interdisciplinary artist working on the politics of marginalised memory and the representation of time across scientific and social fields. She is known equally for her practice as an artist, researcher and writer, and is founding editor of the bi-annual art writing publication un Magazine. She has realised 45 collaborative projects and solo exhibitions for major art galleries, museums and festivals across Australia, Asia and Europe since 2001. She is a post-doctoral researcher at LARCA, Université de Paris, and Adjunct Lecturer at UNSW Sydney.

Synopsis

Displacement is a 3-minute sound work based on two satellite datasets, spanning 1973 and 2016, which I merged in order to correlate shifting dispersions of water with the slowing rotation of the Earth. Converting this data into a musical score provides the acoustic means to grasp the correspondence of shifting dispersion of sea levels and their effect on time, which are causing each day to become fractionally longer to further increase ∆T.

Commissioned for NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, as a live sound event and installation at Sydney Observatory, Displacement highlights the pivotal role of universal time and its regulation as a practical tool in the British colonisation of Australia. The work reveals the widening gap between Eurocentric and colonial premises, as well as advances in technological determination, and the reality that many challenges lie ahead for timekeeping – and outdated and empirical systems need to be reimagined.