What if we start advertising our way of being in time? Upon the invitation of 019 collective, artist Sam De Buysere has designed a billboard that attempts to do precisely that. It prompts visitors to reflect on time itself, to consider duration, and to start devising their own narrative of time.

On a rotating advertising panel, the following text appears as a succession of verses: (1) And it’s about time (2) And it’s about time And this (3) And it’s about time And this is what it looks like. This extending and cyclical flow makes the visitor aware of the passing of time, but also of the accumulation of moments and the amount of information a single moment can contain. The first phrase fuels the confusion with a double meaning. What is there to say about time? Or what is long overdue? The sequence increases from a doubtful utterance to the beginning of a narrative, an announcement of a story. And then it starts again. We are left in suspension and will never know what ‘it’ looks like. The cadence builds and culminates. Again and again.

The phrases on the billboard are based on the first track of the album Being Funny in a Foreign Language by the British alternative rock band The 1975. The song reflects on adolescent memories, overanalyzing them in hindsight. It evokes both nostalgia and regret, as if time itself is experienced multiple times. The reference is both an associative content-related link and a playful preference. Such references are characteristic of De Buysere’s work, which shapes new wholes from fragments of cultural and technological history, as well as from pop culture. In this sense, his practice can be seen as a form of fictitious history writing, or even sampling bits of history into new mixtapes.

How does one design a visual identity for the unfolding of time? The verses are set in the unstable font Seismic by Fraser Muggeridge Studio. Form and content overlap like branding, and the sentences on the billboard seem to slightly fall apart and slip away. Again, De Buysere acts like a producer who brings together various bits of information and formal aspects, acknowledging other authors and designers.

Once evening falls, a green laser beam becomes visible, illuminating the rotating slats of the billboard from the side. Like a lateral sniper, it sharpens its focus to deliver a glancing shot. It brings an element of almost surgical precision into play, as well as a certain alertness. The one uttering the sentences on the billboard seems under threat and never actually starts the story.

Dogs in Cars Are a Dying Breed – a billboard is the most recent iteration of a series of works. This series began with a screenplay Dogs in Cars are a Dying Breed – pilot, written by De Buysere in 2022. The main character, the Speaker, is loosely based on Jane Fonda’s interpretation of Barbarella. The futuristic bombshell astronaut enters into a charged conversation with other characters that include Nam June Paik and Kurt Waldheim. Sam De Buysere hides behind these charismatic characters to speculate on alternative histories and futures. The conversation is set in the zero point of our time system, Greenwich. The screenplay culminates into an act of resistance against linear, scientific time: ‘History itself has stopped, is this where it will all end?’

In 2023, the artist continued to build on this screenplay with the installation Dogs in Cars are a Dying Breed—(proposal for a) theatrical adaptation. The installation is centered on a fictional theater adaptation by Yves Montand of the screenplay. It is presented as a constellation of two wooden crates, a teapot and a desk upon which the typed theater proposal rests. A laser beam connects the three elements. The crates are branded with a logo devised by the artist, ready for shipment. One of them supposedly contains Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture Newton, which is a central reference in the proposal. As such, the installation functions as a twisted time capsule that contains a monument for the scientist who conceived of the notion of absolute time.

Fact and fiction become utterly blurred in the work of De Buysere. He hides behind a screen of (auto)fiction, disguised as cultural references, to investigate the contemporary. The Author is always present, but is watching us from a distance amid a crowd of figures. He hides in plain sight, fully in the present, and yet entirely lost in time.