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Bug
2019

Video, 1 Monitor, Color & Audio 05:11





A countdown from 1997 to 2000

Approaching 2000, many anticipated the Y2K bug would strike at the turn of the millennium. Coded in 2-digits, clocked machines would confuse year ‘00’ with ‘1900’. Software miscalculations would materialize as disasters - planes could fall from the sky, and nuclear power plants could meltdown.

So programmers strive to manipulated time; calendar years were reformatted from two-digit to four-digit – Finally a time that belongs to the 21st century.











送舊迎新 means sending off the old and welcoming the new in Chinese.




As the countdown towards 2000 began and rigorous debugging took place, the local weather forecast mascot Freddy (天氣先生) was removed from its daily right-to-left appearance on air. It detoured aimlessly through time-telling structures Jantar Mantar until its forced retirement.


Headlines on New Year Days: 1997’s extravagant handover fireworks, 1998’s embarrassing failure of the belated colonial midnight gun salute, and 1999’s red-dominated fireworks - charted the city’s absorption into the new. 3 years of active debugging in the background has produced an anti-climax, the top-down retelling of time has rendered all anticipation of a crash entirely baseless.

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