Synthesizing Time (original) (raw)
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2015
One of the most sustained criticisms of Bourdieu’s work is its poverty with respect to theorizing time, change, and history. In this light, this article traces out a series of novel paths in the analysis of temporality and history in relation to cultural production, informed by recent work in anthropology, social theory, and (less so) art history. The challenge of developing new perspectives on such matters does not arise solely from critiques of Bourdieu, but from wider recognition across the humanities of the problematic nature of prevailing forms of historicism, contextualization, and periodization. Several linked departures are proposed: the need to analyze the multiplicity of time in cultural production; the contributions of the art or cultural object––as a nonhuman actor––to the production of time in not one but several dimensions of temporality; and the importance of integrating such thinking into the theorization of history. Advancing beyond philosophical process theory, yet...
2011
This paper investigates the temporality that is produced in some recent and historical examples of media art. In exploring works by Janet Cardiff, Dennis Del Favero, and Omer Fast, I use the philosophy of Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze to understand the convergence of temporalities that are composed in the digital present, as one moment in time overlays another moment. Developing Serres' concept of multi-temporality and Deleuze's philosophy of time and memory into a means to understand the non-linear time presented in these works, I argue that the different compositional strategies enacted by these artists provide the aesthetic grounding to experience "temporal thickness." From here I investigate the interactive digital artworks Frames by Grahame Weinbren and Can You See Me Now? by the artist group Blast Theory. In this investigation, I understand interaction with technology, and the way that it shapes our sensory and processual experience, as a specifically temporal and temporalizing transaction, where human movements in the present are overlayed by technological processes.
Media Times| The Mediatization of Third-Time Tools: Culturalizing and Historicizing Temporality
International Journal of Communication, 2016
Time and media have multiple interfaces as media shape temporalities while changing through history. In three steps, this article explores how cultural time is mediated and how it changes through history. First, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is presented as a fruitful way to understand cultural time as “third time,” mediating between lived, subjective time and cosmic, objective time. Clocks, calendars, generational successions, archives, and documents are third-time tools linking internal to external time flows and producing text-based intersubjective temporality. Second, Ricoeur’s analysis needs to be historicized. After discussing mediatization and its temporal development, the concept of waves is proposed to bridge the concepts of leap and growth. Particular attention is then paid to the latest, digital wave of mediatization. Referring to John Durham Peters and other media historians, some characteristics of this phase of time remediation are listed. Finally, critical, and politica...
The Mediatization of Third-Time Tools: Culturalizing and Historicizing Temporality
2016
Time and media have multiple interfaces as media shape temporalities while changing through history. In three steps, this article explores how cultural time is mediated and how it changes through history. First, Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics is presented as a fruitful way to understand cultural time as "third time," mediating between lived, subjective time and cosmic, objective time. Clocks, calendars, generational successions, archives, and documents are third-time tools linking internal to external time flows and producing text-based intersubjective temporality. Second, Ricoeur's analysis needs to be historicized. After discussing mediatization and its temporal development, the concept of waves is proposed to bridge the concepts of leap and growth. Particular attention is then paid to the latest, digital wave of mediatization. Referring to John Durham Peters and other media historians, some characteristics of this phase of time remediation are listed. Finally, crit...
Toward a Theory of Time for the Digital Humanities
The dominant view of time sees time as homogeneous and one-directional. But this does not adequately characterize the human experience of time: Some hours feel longer than others, for instance, and we may forget what day it is. Moreover, we recall and reshape our pasts, jumping backwards, and we plan for our futures, jumping forwards. When documents become involved, the experience of time is all the more multidimensional. Up to now, the digital humanities have been operating with the dominant (positivist, physical) view of time, but in order to provide a holistic representation of the human condition, other models of time should be explored. This paper argues that Heidegger’s theory of time, from phenomenology, and the theory of document transaction, from document studies, can be used to present a theory of documental time. For Heidegger, time does not exist, per se, but rather unfolds as part of being. Being and time are characterized by the fusion of past, present and future; the three are not simultaneous, but they co-exist and can co-determine each other. The theory of document transaction postulates the document as the momentary coming-together of a person and an object. A document transaction is the mechanism by which a document comes to be; thus the document is neither the object nor the person, but something that arises when the two meet. In documental time, then, the past and future of the person and the past and future of the object cohere in a shared present. This view of time invites a host of analytical and visualization strategies for the digital humanities to explore.
Media In and Out of Time: Multi-temporality and the technical conditions of contemporaneity
This paper was originally presented as a keynote for the conference Digital Subjects III: Temporalities, Paris 8, November 12-14, 2014. Since the earliest developments in electronic media a new form of temporal experience has come into view. It was discovered that time itself was able to be processed, delayed and stored. This paper looks to the history of media, including chronophotography, televisions and computers, that have fragmented the world in order to measure and store time. It asks, what are the new forms of micro-temporalities that these media produce? And what can the analysis of the technical qualities of time media tell us about what it means to be con-temporary?
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In The Future of the Image (2007) Jacques Rancière states that the end of images is behind us. He argues for an aesthetics of the image that acknowledges the continuing power of images as educating documentations of traces of history, as directly affecting interruptions, and as open-to-combining signs of the visible and the sayable ad infinitum. But does Rancière's claim also concern the future of cinema? His cinematic references, in a Deleuzian sense, are mostly to modern time-images. Is the future of film indeed a form of the time-image, or has the 'heart' of cinema moved beyond this image-type? This paper proposes to look at a third category of cinematographic images, based in the third synthesis of time as developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. This filmic image, that could be called the neuro-image, is connected to the impure regime of images typical for the database logic of the digital age. By comparing Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon to the television seriesFlashForward (2009), I will analyse the temporal operations of the image of the time-image to these images of a new regime of images, the image of and from the future. 1
Experiments with time: the technical image in video art, new media and the digital humanities
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In this article, the author begins to identify a new way to understand the experiment in arts and humanities research. Focusing on the production of what Vilém Flusser calls ‘technical images’ in video art and new media projects, he suggests that the experiment in experimental art may be rethought as a method for testing concepts and observations through the application of media technology as an apparatus. The technical image is a time-critical way to understand automatic image making devices and using this method of analysis he identifies examples where artists and humanities scholars have programmed devices to experiment with the time of contemporary media culture. Beginning with an analysis of Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s two works Listening Post and Moveable Type, the author uses a number of examples, from contemporary experiments with digital media to the experiments with video in the 1970s and 1980s, to show how artists and humanities scholars have used technical images to enga...
The Counted Time: Technical Temporalities and their Challenges to History
History and Theory, 2023
One of the main debates regarding historical representation within digital media concerns narrative, particularly the difficulty in articulating it. Digital technologies are usually presented as opposed to linear, written narratives, which is of consequence to historical writing. Despite the many merits of scholarly approaches that try to circumvent this difficulty, the lack of theoretical understanding of the categories implied in such discussions is noticeable. To counter this, this article addresses the relationship between time, technics, and narrative. I contend that the challenges of crafting narratives in digital media conceal a problem pertaining to the relationship between time and technics. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative, Jimena Canales's studies of the history of science, Wolfgang Ernst's and Yuk Hui's discussions of technical temporality, and Bernard Stiegler's understanding of the relationship between time and technics, I argue that it is the temporality imbued in the workings of technical objects (such as computers) that renders them averse to narrative. In making this argument, I employ the notion of "counted time" (in contrast to Ricoeur's "narrative time") to denote a temporal mode that, despite its intersections with social, human temporality, is alien to narrative.