The Thousand-year-old Room

The Thousand-year-old Room or TYOR was a fictive experiment undertaken in 1988, with this underlying idea: within the period of one year, 1000 years of aging are simulated in a test living space.

All factors leading to alterations within the living space are simulated by means of special devices such as a climate simulator, a dust machine and an artificial sun, mainly, however, through laborers who work twenty-four-seven in the TYOR, painting the walls, redecorating etc. With each simulated change of tenant, any traces of aging processes – all being accelerated thousandfold and brought about with a considerable technical effort – are thus destroyed. In the end, the Thousand-year-old Room looks as good as new. In the exhibition Nos Sciences Naturelles in the Centre d' Art Contemporain FRI-ART, Fribourg, 1992, Nana Petzet complemented the work with a series of wall and floor pieces, scientific-looking information panels with descriptions, photos, charts and diagrams. The sense of striving for realism in simulation experiments was mimicked by systematically and minutely taking into account all partial aspects. In TYOR, based on the thousandfold acceleration, it is the problem of simultaneity of mutually exclusive or rather disturbing partial aspects that is being illustrated.