In his piece The Time Tunnel video artist Sean Carpone has created “a mashup of every instance of ‘time-travel-wormhole’ motifs found in science fiction films.”

Besides being totally awesome and mesmerizing to behold, the idea of compiling visual clichés into a single experience is pretty compelling. As you get sucked into these vortices, occasionally recognizing the movies they were grabbed  from (Buck Rogers! The Black Hole!) – you really start to understand that, every image in our culture is much more than a unique signifier for itself. It is also a subliminal reference to every occurrence of similar images used to signify the same thing. The images are words in our visual language.

For the time-travel-wormholes, the exact shapes, glowing lights, colors and all that are really nothing more than a new font choice for the visual sentence: “Holy crap! It’s a time warp!”