Time travel is a tricky business. The bane of scientists, artists and eccentrics for centuries, it’s one of those theories that you just can’t disprove. Yet, once you start trying to pry apart history’s past from its present and future, you have pretty good odds of becoming unglued. Just ask anyone who’s tried.
“That’s how history plays itself out: the desire to keep moving forward collid[es] with all our pasts rushing back at us,” says the time-traveling agent from Comings and Goings, a new installation and audio tour produced by Jeannene Przyblyski and Southern Exposure, the nonprofit community organization and gallery based in San Francisco’s Mission district.
And what better place to investigate the dizzying backwash of history than Lands End, where the remnants of similar experimental journeys are literally piled up in layers along the coast — skeletons of wayward ships, abandoned lighthouses, ill-conceived projects in tidal energy, alongside the eerie ruins of the Sutro baths.
The installation, audio tour, and a companion booklet were created for Southern Exposure by Przyblyski and the cryptic Bureau of Urban Secrets. The very site-specific project invites fellow travelers to explore the coast while listening to the transmissions of an unnamed narrator, who has been sent back in time by the Bureau with the goal of chronicling moments in Lands End’s past and future. The podcast is available on Southern Exposure’s website, where the agent’s exploits can be burned onto a CD or loaded into an MP3 player.
What you and the Bureau receive are diary-like entries from the time-traveling agent, who alternately describes the scenes before her, waxes poetic on the nature of time-travel and exploration, and points out the familiar and hidden markers of change in the area’s cultural and natural history. Along the trail, she revisits moments from the known history of the area — the ships wrecked and encounters made — and also the rumors, folklore and unresolved stories that lend the area its mystery. Some seasoned explorers might even discover a momento or two of the agent’s own adventures.