Seeing Time is an exhibition of more than thirty media installations: moving-image film and video environments and static artworks created with photographic or technological materials. The first public presentation of works from the private collection of San Francisco—based benefactors and contemporary-art patrons Pamela and Richard Kramlich, the exhibition traces their vision and thoughtful construction of what might best be called a text—a sense of the moment is described in its collected order from the Kramlich's direct engagement with the art and ideas of our times.

The exhibition represents a range of contemporary explorations in media art involving time-based forms and the camera as a means of perceptual expansion. Seeing Time explores perception through the principle that vision is shaped by the time in which we live and the idea that life today can no longer be distinguished from the influences of photographic, mechanical, and technological devices of seeing. The fascination with the moving, the still, and the projected image is a contemporary phenomenon that fulfills the artists' desire to expand the status and the materiality of an artwork from that of discrete object (such as the painted surface of a canvas) to one of temporal and sensory experience. Throughout the twentieth century, and most particularly over the past twenty-five years, emerging technologies have transformed social and intellectual life. This transformation in turn, has inspired new art practices and disciplines for the expression of contemporary states of being. The formation of vision as reflected in the Kramlich Collection is threefold: philosophical, figurative, and technical.

The artworks in Seeing Time demonstrate the insights and ambitions of three generations of artists who have addressed, or in some instances provoked, a revolution in perception. Advances in instrumentation, the artist's reaction to visual technology and media as materials for art, and the location of the figure in the image environment are unifying concerns. The emphasis on prescient subject matter, innovative methods of presenting theme and material, as well as other audiovisual installation variants are examples of some of the most advanced sculptural practices of our time. In some cases, the artist looks both backward to reference cinematic conventions or historical imagery from paintings and photographs and forward to new knowledge of sciences of the mind, ecology, and theoretical biology. In each case the artists model or measure the effects of information on consciousness. Media art has been traditionally understood in terms of the spatial construction of visual and aural information (the physical components of video, image, and sound apparatuses as elements in the artwork) and the temporal organization of data in each photographic medium (the rapidly obsolescing, fugitive materials of film, video, and most recently, digital media and interactive networks). The installations on view contain within them a history of media art through which the relationship of the viewer to the artwork and that of art to perception is expressed and defined.