Synthesizing Time (original) (raw)
Making Time: Temporality, History, and the Cultural Object
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.
The Suspension of History in Contemporary Media Arts
Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, 2000
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A Game on Time: The Witness and the Temporality of the Digital Image
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2020
This essay addresses the temporality of digital images through a reading of the 2016 puzzle game The Witness. Fusing Paul Ricoeur’s definition of narratives as “games with time” and Alexander Galloway’s description of the computer as “remediating the very conditions of being itself,” I describe The Witness as a game on time. The methodical pace it ties its player to, along with the environmental awareness it elicits, creates, rather than simply representing, relations of time that bespeak the accelerated, non-human temporality—the “protentions” (Yuk Hui)—of digital objects and environments. Taking the game’s embedding of a ten-minute sequence from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983) within its gameplay as a cue, I develop these ideas in relationship to both the phenomenology of time and the cinema of the “time image,” in particular the work of Abbas Kiarostami. For game designer Jonathan Blow, as for Kiarostami, the digital image is a fundamentally new form of temporal experience that requires new kinds of environmental awareness and care (Sorge).
Material Imagination: on the Avant-Gardes, Time and Computation
Fun and Software: On Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova, London - New-York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
The future is our only goal Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko Slogan from the newspaper Art of the Commune Those who flick through the pages of old magazines for long enough know that each epoch had its own future, similar to the 'Future in the Past' of English grammar: as if the people of the past extend themselves into infinitude along a straight line, drawn through their own time at a tangent to eternity. Such a future never comes, because humankind walks into the future along a complex and barely comprehensible trajectory …[in these magazines] people from yesterday's tomorrow … stand in their pumped up space suits next to the chubby rockets, and above them an arrow of a space shuttle blasting off glides in the pale zenith -a painfully beautiful Noon of humankind … Victor Pelevin, 'Soviet Requiem' in Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011).
Temporality: Essay by Georgs Avetisjans, 2016
Photography and cinematography are technologies that seem to tell us something important about time. Not just simply representations of time, but also various ways of producing ideas about it: the folding of time, concepts of memory and history that these images represent. How do we, as human beings, actually experience and understand this notion? What are the similarities and what are the differences between the still and moving image? How do other theorists, photographers and filmmakers support the idea of time, flow of time, memory and its representation in these two mediums? This essay aims to explore these questions. Firstly, it looks at photography and its relation to time. Secondly, it considers similarities and differences between the still and moving image and the way in which they represent ideas about time. Thirdly, it explores this question from various key theorists, photographers and filmmakers. And finally, it looks at work what represents these ideas. At the beginning of the essay I considered André Bazin as one of the key writers about temporality and also the work of Roland Barthes who introduced and expanded his approach from his own experience into philosophical and ontological perspective. After, I developed the argument based on French film theorist Christian Metz and English film theorist and writer Peter Wollen: both are discussing and rethinking great ideas of relationship between still and moving image with respect to flow of time and also the perception of time in terms of spectatorship. Further, I explored one of the most inspirational German filmmaker, director and photographer Wim Wenders and his portrayal of the flow of life, accidental and time itself. Thanks to his films, photographs and especially thoughts from an interview at the Kunstforeningen Gammel Strand (2014) that made me more interested in this question and drove my attention towards the exploration of time, flow and even the importance of sequencing movie frames into the chronological order, and most importantly – the notion of valuing the flow of time. I also enjoyed Wenders’ way of looking at the seriousness of time in photography and its relation to it in comparison to cinematic image.