When I read the prompt for this week's practicum, I thought immediately to the idea of real time and the ways in which it can artificially be experienced with time codes. In the digital age, it is very easy to fake an image or a video—there's a sense of anxiety about the fact that what we seem to be experiencing isn't what is actually happening. So in movies, the time code and the grainy, high-angle surveillance camera get put in as technologies that are indexical to some "real" source. A good example of this concept comes from the movie "Time Code," a film that is shot in real time as 4 simultaneous 90-minute takes. The trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQidFlpYlDw

Time Code is fantastic. Importantly, it takes into account the idea that real time is not quite compatible with our cinema time attention spans and reconciles this by splitting the screen into 4 quadrants of simultaneous events. The time code itself plays a central role in creating the drama of the film. The same concept is the driving force behind the show 24, which also operates on the premise of real-time narration. 

Similar "real time" technologies are being used to create dramatic tension everywhere—the sped-up time codes of time-lapse videos and 10 second tickers on Snapchat are some of my personal favorites, just to name a few. I think it must have something to do with our faith in numbers. In the age of photoshop, we might not trust our images, but it's much harder to shake our trust in the ticking clock.