Tim White “Terminal 3” (“Terminal At Last”), 2003 (from the series “Terminal”)

video, HDTV, 8 minutes,

Music by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm from the album “Drawn from Life”

Inspired by the coarseness of natural materials like sand and stone, ancient philosophers pondered the idea that matter was made of indivisible units separated by void. Aristotle who believed that matter was infinitely divisible and composed of four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. These four elements, as well as their interpretation on different tiers of life, are philosophically present in late works of Tim White - persistently and overwhelming.

 “Terminal-3”, or “Terminal Dream”, is the last of the “Terminal” series video – after “Terminal 1” (“Day at the terminal”) and “Terminal 2” (“Terminal at night”). Both – “Day” and “Night” “Terminals” are staged at the same location, but offer experience, effects and symbols in a complementing one another manner. Scenes are plentiful and staged as if their creator sleepwalks through the first and last moments of his life.

Streamline of frames in this series is literally disassembled and dispersed into fragments of artistic vision. The artist examines physical shapes and spiritual context of multi-layered ensembles he had created for the sole purpose of escape from reality. Aesthetic impact and functional significance of his experiment are grown out of investigating the relationships between reality and memory, between sharpened senses and their film equivalents.

Tim White’s “Terminal” is the place on the borderline between being and non-being, a ceaseless state of being both in space and time, in infinity and in eternity. Such a conceptual leap took the artist into the cosmic whole. Given that cosmic wholeness in terms of both space and time stems from Bell's theorem of no such things as separate parts or separate events, all the “events” are interconnected in an intimate and immediate way. Ab initio ad eternum, the universe is one continuous whole.

Reminiscent of the “Moving Paintings” matter, the “Terminal” series contains all that was necessary to recreate the motion White had analyzed in still art works. As analytical as Muybridge's work 150 years ago, Tim White’s sequences strive to revive virtual images of life, just like Muybridge created one of the primitive motion-picture machines for the purpose of stopping and recording action. Paintings that came alive and started moving and changing in Tim White’s invention are destined to eternity. Here is the bridge to his “terminal reality” - endless life term enclosed in a circle of art.

In “Terminal Dream”, as well as in “Moving Paintings”, computer language became a basis for generating moving pictures. Every new frame derived from an original image was to be considered, as an infinite improvisation on ever changing work, was it direct or indirect. Tim White is the only living artist who manipulates with computer code regular analog film footage. Not only that allows him to create new visual effects and animations, but also enables him to create a film timeline with a computer-coded sequence of events. 

From philosophical point of view, the computer code here was created within contemplation on life of an artwork. In “Terminal”, the artist takes up on a revision of paradigms of reality, of the universe, and of human beings that are superficial and incomplete. Without distinction between the past, present, and future, Tim White brings them together at the arrival gates that only lead to the next departure.

In a prerogative that all human beings sooner or later become aware of their nature as a creative spark of infinity, there is directing sign to understanding Tim White’s work. To expand one’s consciousness, he is not attempting to explain the enigma of life and death. He recreates a cell of the cosmos from living with full knowledge of one’s infinite nature. The idea of human departures and arrivals in life Tim White developed as a study of the continuity at the moment of crisis.

 “Terminal 3” in its artistic endeavor is an abstraction of a fragmented mind - advanced into the art form and reflected upon with exhilaration. The artist grasps time continuum in recollection that life is configured time, an interconnected focal point in the universe. At the terminal, time seems to have stopped, to have forgotten the ways on how to live.  The world is starting to fade into oblivion but never makes it there. It stays.

…Eyes blink, then blinking turns into a firework and picturesque palette of the paintings ever born in the imagination of the artist. All the colors suddenly fade in a struggle for dominance. The obsession of the artist with the formula of perfect infinity is sovereign in the final work of the “Terminal” series. Multiple clips of de-fragmented film exhibit a blast of imperfections of which the imagination can conceive.

Tim White has arrived at the time and place where his art interprets how we are a continuity of the past, present, and future; he gains a wider perception of the reality in an infinite degree… Having entered upon a new existence, the images from his earlier works break apart into the pulsing energy that surrounds the cellular structures of the artist’s grand design of life.