This video work by Broersen & Lukács is a re-interpretation of 'Everytime', a pop song released in 2004 by Britney Spears, a tragic ballad about love and loss. A few years later, Spears suffered from a breakdown due to a variety of personal and professional struggles and was admitted to several drug rehabilitation facilities. Around that time, she also shaved her head as an act of rebellion.
Spears's behavior and personal life continued to trigger obsessive media attention; her immense popularity was enhanced by the controversy surrounding her personality and her mental condition. Britney Spears is a typical example of a pop icon objectified by media coverage – or how popular media are responsible for creating idols and monsters at the same time.

Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács address issues of identity, virtualisation and mediatisation in their work. Their interpretation of 'Everytime' shows one simple shot of a static, alienating, bald-headed Britney, unnatural and unnerving at the same time. The sound and the expressions on her face are derived from a young Belgian girl who recorded her own, heartfelt version of the song and placed it on YouTube. The girl performs in an angelic and innocent way – but it's unsettling how her sincere facial expressions are edited into an entirely virtual Britney, a 3D animation created by a Chinese designer who doesn't master the English language and with whom Broersen and Lukacs communicated through technical language and Google translations only.

With these intricate layers of depersonalisation, re-mediation and re-interpretation, Broersen and Lukacs demonstrate how reality and (mass) media are strongly intertwined today. We witness an intimate embrace, a continuous movement back and forth between real and mediated events, between what happens in everyday life, in the virtual sphere, and in the media landscape.

Time Paradise is distributed by the Netherlands Instittue of Media Arts (NIMK).