How to Write (in and of time)
[6] Time-sense could be thought of in a number of ways, such as the way time is felt, the way time is arranged through composition (especially real-time compositional practices), and of course the various approaches Stein used to keep time in the present through techniques in writing (such as the continuous present). Time-sense could also relate to a plot (a narrative that evolves over time or something that is happening simultaneously), etc. Or it could be a composition composed of elements from different time periods, creating a layered sense of time. Time-sense in this essay is seen in relation to composition but encompasses all of these aspects.
[7] We only need to look at platforms such as Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, SCALAR, etc. to understand how these modes of presentation are dramaturgical. They give rise to the types of arrangements being made today. As assemblages of images, ideas, videos—found, linked, and created on-line, they are curatorial acts of meaning making. How they are used to innovate other compositional arrangements and make us think differently is something we have yet to fully understand since we are living in this moment and cannot analyse it from a distance. Using these platforms, or the strategies and techniques they offer, is one way of understanding how we might think, arrange, compose, do research, write, etc. differently through them. How we consume information will create new forms of dissemination and vice-versa: one cannot change an outcome without changing a process. New forms of research, presentation, and ideation will emerge out of these platforms. As dramaturgies of information-gathering and sharing, they are performative. These digital platforms are metaphors for the ways in which we view what they assemble: tumbling through images, for instance. Interestingly, they are also vehicles for real-time composition making.
[8] Object-Oriented Philosopher Tim Morton asks: “How can we account for the beginning of a thing…what does beginning mean?” In answering this question, he refers to Aristotle and the phenomenon of aperture. Morton interprets Aristotle’s poetics of beginning, middle, and end to mean that “things have a feeling of beginning, a feeling of being in the middle [which he calls development], and a feeling of ending (closure). Beginning, middle and end are aesthetic—so we can use them to talk about causality, since we have established that causality is aesthetic.” See Ask/Tell.
[9] This stance on the curatorial is not new to my practice. For the past decade I have wondered: How can one curate an exhibition without being didactic? Or, more precisely, how can one curatorially enact meaning by providing an experience through which to “read” an exhibition other than with/by explanation and description? Or in writing: how can one write an exhibition into being—or write it as a parallel experience—rather than write about an exhibition. I am particularly interested in the ways in which curators might performatively enact modes of viewership through new approaches to didactics, for example. By didactics I mean how we frame an idea. A didactic is in many ways an abstraction—it gives a certain form to thought and in this way often pins down the meaning of an artists’ work that could otherwise stay open. Didactics (i.e. those panels we find in exhibitions near an artwork or at the front of an exhibition that explicitly states the theme as authored by a curator), as an example of what I am trying to re-order here, tends, for example, to reduce an art work’s meaning by fixing an interpretative frame for it. For me, this is where the curatorial gets confused with curating.