PLAYTIME

PLAYTIME serves as a critical meditation on the spatial and auditory architecture of cinema. Drawing from two Jacques Tati films, Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967), this work is an immersive installation featuring seven sculptural objects and a 43-minute sound composition. Here, instead of offering a nostalgic homage to the Tati films, Jasper undertakes a rigorous deconstruction of their visual and sonic languages, unveiling their encoded critiques of modernity and technologized life. 

At its core, PLAYTIME is not concerned with recreation, but rearticulation. Jasper abstracts and repurposes the visual codes of Tati’s cinema—its modular furniture, its sterile glass and steel environments, its choreographed human gestures—recasting them in fragmented sculptural forms. These sculptural elements evoke the alienating geometries of postwar modernist architecture, emphasizing how design, under the guise of progress, often becomes a vehicle of control and estrangement. Through this interpretation, Jasper highlights Tati’s own ambivalence toward modernist aesthetics, drawing attention to how they can both captivate and domesticate the viewer.

It is sound, however, that becomes the true locus of the installation’s critical inquiry. By isolating and remixing the elements of Tati’s soundscapes—where mechanical beeps, synthetic buzzes, and saccharine music function as temporal markers—Jasper constructs a new auditory experience. This track is accessible only from within a transparent plastic sound sphere, isolating it from the rest of the installation and transforming listening into a solitary, quasi-scientific act, recalling the diagnostic or disciplinary apparatus. The individual must physically insert their head into the sealed environment of the plastic sphere, paralleling the way modern subjectivity is shaped by compartmentalized and curated streams of information. This act not only foregrounds the artificiality of mediated experience but also alludes to the conditions of spectatorship in contemporary life. 

What Jasper achieves with PLAYTIME is not a static environment but a dynamic, critical space in which cinema’s architectural and sensory apparatus is exposed, estranged, and made available for analysis. The installation functions as a phenomenological experiment: visitors navigate a semi-recognizable world of cinematic fragments, engaging not with narrative but with its scaffolding. In doing so, Jasper probes how cinema extends beyond the screen, infiltrating everyday perception and constructing ideologies of modern living.

Ultimately, PLAYTIME interrogates how the languages of film—visual, auditory, and spatial—sculpt our relationship with the world, bringing into question the boundaries between fiction and reality, reproduction and experience. Jasper's installation calls for a reevaluation of cinema as not only entertainment but also as an epistemological force—one that continues to shape, discipline, and aestheticize the contours of contemporary life.