Of clocks ticking: Heterotopic space, time and motion in William Kentridge’s 'The Refusal of Time' (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fleeing from Absence: four cross-disciplinary essays on time, its nature and its interpretations
2009
In Fleeing from Absence, Olga Ast explores the nature and interpretations of time in four essays: "The Visualization of Time," "In search of Absent Time," "The Origin of Forms" and "A Copy Machine." Eschewing narrow distinctions between disciplines traditionally employed to discuss the concept of time, Ast blends evidence and opinions from art, science, philosophy and literature into a cohesive whole. While the cross-disciplinary approach of combining the arts with science is increasingly popular, Ast believes that we have yet to see a true collaboration between them. Her book and other interdisciplinary projects attempt to establish a new medium that not confined to art or science but drawn from both.
Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, 2005
Introduction On the opening pages of Manuel DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) the reader is invited to join the author in imagining``a future generation of killer robots dedicated to understanding their historical origin'' (page 2). He then goes on to suggest that``We may even imagine specialized`robot historians' committed to tracing the various technological lineages that gave rise to their species. And we could further imagine that such a robot historian would write a different kind of history than would its human counterpart'' (pages 2^3). Since he introduced this robot historian, DeLanda has undertaken the tremendous task of thinking through the philosophical architectonics of its history. Among the many disciplines he manages to fuse together, one may especially notice the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Fe¨lix Guattari, the new history of Fernand Braudel, neoinstitutional economics, nonlinear geometry, post-Chomskyan linguistics, neo-Darwinian evolutionism, and digital technology. The result, so far, has emerged as a powerful philosophical realism, where``reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds'' (DeLanda, 1997, page 21, emphasis in original). Understanding these immanent transitions requires``a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences on interactions of these forms'' (pages 21^22). An important and still open issue in DeLanda's work is, however, whether the subject matter of such a history is the matter-energy flows themselvesöthe`abstract diagrams' as he calls themöor the forms these diagrams produce. According to Deleuze, a diagram`i s neither the subject of history, nor something outside of history. It makes history by disassembling previous realities and significations, and in their place constitutes new points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions and improbable continuums. It doubles history with a becoming'' (1986, pages 42^43). One should notice that doubling history with a becoming implies here, in Deleuze's book on Foucault, an irreversible relationship between abstract diagrams and the knowledge archives they give form to. Deleuze says that, even though the diagrams are moving and fluctuating, the autogenerated forms of knowledge they catalyze öfor instance, historyöare unable to grasp these fluxes as properly historical. If history cannot cover the fluctuating diagrams it is because the diagrams keep changing the knowledge we call history.
Space and Time in Science and Technology Education, RDST 4
Living the same day over and over again as experienced by Phil Connors, a reporter in the film "Groundhog Day"? Stopping time and freezing the world to the sound of lute as performed by Dominique, a minstrel in "Les visiteurs du soir"? It makes us think of a fantasy or science-fiction work. We can indeed come and go, move around in any direction but we cannot change our position in time. While the daily practice of space and time is apparently obvious, their conceptualisation in science is problematic and cannot be taken for granted.
At the beginning of the Twentieth century, individuals experience a neurotic acceleration of daily time, particularly in metropolitan areas, which reduces the capacity for reasoning and understanding approaching the loss of Denkraum – the space of thinking – theorized by Aby Warburg (1923). This anthropological transformation, economizing the time of reasoning, leads to a progressive acceleration in the ways of communicating and understanding the simple social messages of daily life. The result is a progressive osmosis between the structural acceleration of society and the common language by deleting all grammatical structures to speed up the communication parameters. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct how the avant-gardes (Cubism, Italian and Russian Futurism) respond to this metamorphosis, analysing through the writings of Roman Jakobson, published between 1919 and 1921, the new pathology of the metropolis in figurative and alphabetical languages at the beginning of the century.
Modernism, Time Machines, and the Defamiliarization of Time
Configurations, 2015
Many works of modernist literature and art aspired to the condition of time machines. While the early phases of modernism's history contain the first appearance of such a device in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), the aesthetic experiments that we typically associate with the singular noun modernism have not been considered in relation to this foundational science-fiction trope or its numerous offshoots burgeoning through our cultural landscape today. Yet, if we reflect on what many of the most famous texts and paintings were doing in form and theme, it is clear that the modernist aesthetic called attention to itself not only as a vehicle for experiencing and moving in time, but also as a technique for rethinking that experience and movement. Moreover, modernist experiments often sought self-consciously to question and reconceptualize time by foregrounding the ways in which their own devices, often in concert with psychological, social, and historical mechanisms, struc-93
MA Thesis: Other spacetimes. The notions of time and space in new media art.
This thesis will explore the notion of spatiality and temporality in the relatively new field of new media art. It will argue that art produced by new media challenges the conventional understanding of time and space. On the examples of two artworks, Masaki Fujihata’s ‘FieldWorks’ (2002) and Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s ‘Listening Post’ (2001/2002), this paper will aim to demonstrate how new media art confronts the traditional perception of time and space and provides new opportunities for experiencing temporality as well as dimensionality that occurs simultaneously, i.e. that of the author, the viewer and the artwork. Furthermore, this thesis will argue that new media art generates its own micro-temporality and micro-spatiality, which coexist with their established traditional notions although at the same time remaining against them. Lastly, taking to account new media art’s relation to time and space, this thesis will investigate the capacity of new media art to be transformed – migrated, emulated, and reinstantiated – and it will delve into the possibility of preservation and curation of these media.
Archetypes and Architecture of Time
EDP Sciences, 2013,, 2013
This paper and poster seek to address several fundamental questions about time. What are the natural phenomena and cognitive structures that underlie the human perception of time? What social constructs have evolved around questioning its nature? How did they arise and evolve over the ages? I have been exploring the subject of time merging my background as a conceptual artist with principles of scientific study. My focus has been on the changing visualizations of time through the evolution of human society, from the earliest depictions of the flowing river or the circular uroboros – a snake eating its own tail – to the linear arrow and the paintings of Dali and Magritte, who depict time with modern metaphors of a clock, a train, or the 4th dimension. How have these images influenced scientific, religious and philosophical thought surrounding time? Drawn by now from our collective subconscious, do they naturally bias us towards particular conventional models? And finally, how can an analysis of the visual metaphors of time contribute to the larger dialogue, one that involves scientists, technologists and philosophers, each with their own theories on the subject? This project attempts to answer these questions, and to propose that art is an essential voice in any discussion about time. Can artists and scientists working together bring us closer to an answer to the age-old question – what is time?
The Explosion of 'Time' in Early Twentieth Century Cubist, Surrealist, Futurist and Kinetic Art1
When Filippo Marinetti proclaimed the death of 'time and space' in the Futurist manifesto, he was reacting, like many artists of his time, to the political and sociocultural struggles that characterised the period beginning from around 1880 to the first few decades of the 20th century. The potency which speed, the machine and the dominance of the metropolis generated during this period, and the resulting distinctive consciousness of time, presented artists with a challenge. This paper seeks to not only consider the relationships that developed between time and art during this period, but to explore the more subtle parodies, tensions and complexities faced by many artists, from various and at times opposing art movements, as they struggled to create the experience of time for the observer and in the process, create an explosion in artistic conventions.
Digital Bodies
Western society is often described as 'instant network society' or 'digital society', suffering from increasing time pressure, hurriedness and the scarcity of time. But what drives our temporal existence? Over the last 200 years, our living standards and norms have changed drastically, from an agricultural society, where natural rhythms defined the pace of life, to the Industrial Age with its key invention of the mechanical clock, to the contemporary urban 24/7 society. The temporal point of reference has thus changed from natural rhythms to the precision of the atomic clock, with a significant impact on our relationship to time. Modern technology plays a decisive part in contributing to the fragmentation of time, and also leading to a structural change to flexible time. Clock time is still the base, but societal synchronisation processes have changed profoundly due to digital technology. A leap back in time to temporal structures of the past does not meet contemporary living standards of individuality, autonomy and freedom of choice (Rosa and Scheuerman 2009: 77-111). Today's time crisis needs a fresh approach.