The Khronos Projector is an interactive art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic videotape allows a simple control of the reproducing process. Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time.

By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatiotemporal surface that “cuts the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

When contemplating a still image or a motionless sculpture, we are free to direct our sight wherever we want over the whole work—perhaps only secretly compelled by the compositional forces the author has succeeded instilling in it. This is barely possible in a movie—we are forced to adopt a point of view in space and time. Using the power of modern computers, we can free ourselves from this constraint. The Khronos Projector unties time and space in a pre-recorded movie sequence, opening the door for an infinite number of interactive visualizations. Using the Khronos Projector, event's causality become relative to the spatial path we decide to walk on the image, allowing for a multiple interpretation of the recorded facts. In this sense, the Khronos Projector can be seen as an exploratory interface that transforms a movie sequence into a spatiotemporal sculpture for people to explore at their own pace and will.