Tim Etchells

@timetchells.bsky.social

884 Followers 180 Following

Artist. Language. Performance. Forced Entertainment. www.timetchells.com www.forcedentertainment.com London.

Two flyposters on a wall. One for performance maker and artist Tim Etchells, the other for the singer Tom Jones.
Screenshot of a text in a word processing document, the text highlighted in blue. It reads: and so it came to pass, that the ebbs, flows and traces of their identities, their needs, fears, perspectives, intimacies and heart-songs, their dreams, travel-plans, poems, night-sweats, desires, decisions and images, their secrets, loves, passions, medical traumas, dilemmas, anxieties, stories, hopes and whispered histories, became mere numbers for the opportunist frackers of the human, of value only as a part of the dataset, ripe for abstraction, aggregation and distant monetization, nothing more
Gene Hackman, in a still from The Conversation. He sits to the left of the frame, playing saxophone, to the right his apartment with the walls and floor torn up.
Performer Seke Chimutengwende wearing a wig and clutching a banana, lipsyncs a text which is spoken by an AI voice.
Forced Entertainment performer Claire Marshall stands outside next to a chain link fence in the snow and lip-syncs the following text, which is spoken by a slowed down AI text-to-speech voice: And they were like Forced Entertainment’s Signal to Noise has been nominated for the Nachtkritik Theatretreffen 2025 and I was like wait, what what even is that and they they were like it's you know a prize a big a theatre prize in in Germany and I was, it was like, Forced? Forced what!? wait is this really, I mean is this really happening? is it? am i am i really talking? am I talking? is this actually happening?
Forced Entertainment performer Richard Lowdon wearing a black wig, glasses and some kind of logo-enhanced sports cardigan lipsyncs to a text that is spoken by an AI text to speech programme in a spaced-out american accent. The voice says: And they were like Forced Entertainment’s Signal to Noise has been nominated for the Nachtkritik Theatretreffen 2025 and I was like wait, what what even is that and they they were like it's you know a prize a big a theatre prize in in Germany and I was, it was like, Forced? Forced what!? wait is this really, I mean is this really happening? is it? am i am i really talking? am I talking? is this actually happening?
Forced Entertainment performer Terry O'Connor in a black wig and brown leather jacket stands against a wall and lip-syncs the following text which is spoken by an AI voice in an American accent: And they were like Forced Entertainment’s Signal to Noise has been nominated for the Nachtkritik Theatretreffen 2025 and I was like wait, what what even is that and they they were like it's you know a prize a big a theatre prize in in Germany and I was, it was like, Forced? Forced what!? wait is this really, I mean is this really happening? is it? am i am i really talking? am I talking? is this actually happening?
A logo/badge/icon that says Nachtkritik TheaterTreffen 25 and Nominierte Inszenierung (Nominated Production).
a screenshot from a search engine. the user has typed 'how to conquer' - the list of suggested auto completions below reads: how to conquer fear how to conquer anxiety how to conquer fear of heights how to conquer fear of flying how to conquer the world how to conquer social anxiety how to conquer depression how to conquer fear of spiders how to conquer your mind how to conquer stage fright
A hand using a pen to write in a notebook. So far already written it says I read somewhere that the idea of constant time does not exist in dreams. In case you find a clock in your dream you’d see that the hands are not visible.
In foreground to the right a woman in a grey t-shirt, out-of-focus, thinking. In the background a man in a blue shirt, his hands raised and pressed together as though he is making a sound with his fingertips. He looks as though he is listening intently.
A screenshot of an 'error message' which says 'if you turn this off, some experiences won't be available to you'
Reflection in a window of a white neon sign by artist Tim Etchells. The lettering is reversed in the reflection but is still readable, it says 'continue without accepting'. A figure in silhouette can be seen walking past the sign.
White neon sign viewed through a window. The sign by artist Tim Etchells comprises the single word 'problem' which has been installed upside-down.
The escalation and feverish denial of the climate catastrophe brought them to a broader rapture of desperate illogic that infected public discourse on almost all levels and topics. With carbon emission and rising temperatures effectively decoupled, myriad forms of causality and connection were susceptible to spurious challenge, fracture or unmaking, the social and political space of the planet recast as an apoplectic free-for-all in which nonsense often prevailed. Science and massacre, identity, and geopolitics – no subject was immune from this frenzy of counterfactual undoing. And amid this discursive sickness - arising from climate change denial and the profound disconnect between word and world it birthed - the LLM AIs emerged as both symptom and accelerant, spewing endless argument without ground, value, stake, or position. Into conversation that was already vexed, California summoned the scrambled voices of the dead to drown out the voices of the living.
Performer Aurélie Alessandroni standing by a piano in Tim Etchells' performance How Goes the World.
Screenshot of an OS message asking 'Are you sure you want to open 100,438 messages? Each message opens in a separate window.' Dialogue boxes offer the option to Cancel or Open.
Screenshot image of a survey. An empty check-box on the left, next to it the sentence 'I did not share my thoughts with anyone'.
Image of a text that reads: The more they wrecked the planet and its ecosystems the more they filled it with representations of what they’d lost; renderings, recordings and images conjured in stunning resolution. Entering the public toilets at Liverpool Street station that summer as the planet burned, they were greeted with both the stench of piss and the recorded sounds of a fabulous tropical forest, the calls of birds long dead or threatened with extinction rebounding in all directions from the tiles and glass.
Book cover - a white neon sign glowing on top of a building against a dark blue sky, the sign reads LET'S PRETEND NONE OF THIS EVER HAPPENED, in all-capital letters.
Artist Tim Etchells stands next to his neon work 'Problems (Double Upside Down)' (2023). The white neon sign shows two identical versions of the word 'Problems' which are both installed upside down.
White neon sign on a white wall. The letters are all lower-case. They spell out the words 'continue without accepting'.
A framed image of a drawing. In purple painted all-caps letters it says 'Black Sky Thinking'.