"Our present moment as a petrified past to come..."
Repeated images of the plant-festered, human-less city; alienating quotidian artefacts by imagining what future historians would say about them; equally wanting and not-wanting to have kids; Pompeii 2.0: this time it's everything.
Time, as experienced in the context of the Anthropocene, acts as both executor and saviour. "The time has passed", yet "we still have some time".
Linked Readings
Capitalism & Time
Temporalities - Russell West-Pavov [ch. 6: Economics]
- "In the course of Enlightenment modernization, time was separated from locality and removed to an abstract, framing position encompassing all places, though this abstract absolute time was only universal in principal before the spread of coordinated, universal time in the late nineteenth century." (123)
- "A whole array of temporal strategies, from the development of shift-timetables, bells and horns to mark the passage of time, via long-service rewards such as pocket-watches, through to the rhythm of the machines themselves, created a deeply ingrained consciousness of industrial time, and a sense of discipline which became part of the worker’s subjectivity." (125)
- "Time is money." (126)
Battery icons shape perceptions of time and pace and define user identities - City University London
- "People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their battery away..."
How capitalism killed sleep - Laura Gasciogne
- "In our own telecommuting era, every home is a potential non-stop workplace illuminated by the blue light of a digital screen."
One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece) - Tehching Hsieh
Folding Time, Queering Time
The Autonomy of Affect - Brian Massumi
- "Intensity [of affective experience] would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static-temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It's like a temporal sink, a hole in time, as we conceive of it and narrativize it." (86)
- "... suspense could be distinguished from and interlinked with expectation, as superlinear and linear dimensions of the same image-event, which is at the same time an expression-event." (87)
Which Way is Tomorrow?
Fumé - Sarah Rodigari
Black Quantum Futurism - Rasheedah Phillips
- "For many of us the indoctrination of mechanical, linear, clock time begins at a young age."
- "Like maps, clocks are objects that embody certain ideals, politics, notions of time, and boundaries."
Genesis 1:1 - 2:3
- "And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day."
A Prayer for Time
Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through - T Fleischmann [excerpt]
- "I count backward to figure out when I started taking hormones—Seattle, Brooklyn, moving away from the South, Berlin with Simon, falling in love with Otelia . . . I land in some summer, I don’t know when. I distrust linearity, but bodies can seem like one of the only linear things—age, getting bigger and then smaller, death. Another reason to appreciate the transitioning body, which ages backward, every person seeming to become younger, with or without taking hormones. It’s a good reminder that the body was never linear in the first place."
3 Images; 3 Texts
1. Trees gather time as thickness. Thick time enmeshes temporalities, viewing time as something to be involved with rather than something to linearly traipse. A co-operative participation, rather than a unit of measure. Spatio-temporal language is no mere conflation: it encourages the understanding that time acts on and with an event just as space does. To point to a tree ring and say "this is where it happened" is to understand that an event in time has not passed just as a location cannot pass. Both flux, of course; but the past, present, and future are simply delineations based on an anthropocentric point of view. Front and back, here and there, now and then. Trees, like all of us, carry and continue their past into the future.
2. The overgrown building writes life (futurity) into the past. A tree continues its past; the overgrown building is the past continuing. The future, for both, is folded into past and present. As the tree's rings brings the past physically into the future, the overgrown building brings the future into the past by reimagining a building's subject. Who is the building for? Who can the building habit? Who will the building habit, once humans are inevitably gone? Intentionality, when met with temporality (as it must), is always negotiation.
3. When I go for a walk, I do not remember details with the linearity that I would capture if I filmed the entire journey. Though I may recall a footbridge I discover over a tiny stream, I do not remember how many minutes into my walk I was when I crossed it, nor do I necessarily remember if it came before or after I found some spiky green seeds strewn on the side of a small road. Walking (or, generally, moving) is necessarily mediating space-time, immersing one's body in the midst of here, then, there, and now. Moving admits the intra-action of all things by enmeshing time, place, thought and headspace, allowing a meditative non-location of re-decontextualisation that makes possible new connections, alternative points of view, and an experience of thick time.
E-concepts: trans-meditation; medial-tation; "let's do the time [walk] again"; un(t)ravelling; cont(a)inuing; in(tra)habiting; temporavelling