PARSE journal issue 4 by anders wennerström

04 Issue

issue e ditors Dave Beech, Ingrid Elam, Anders Hultqvist, Andrea Phillips

Times Bruno Latour, Simon Critchley, The Otolith Group, Valérie Pihet, Benedikte Zitouni, John Hill, Claire Louise Staunton, Andy Weir, Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren, Jenny Tunedal, Jason E. Bowman, Anthony Howell, Gerhard Eckel, Atxu Amann y Alcocer, Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez, Sonja Dahl, Edgar Schmitz, Katleen Vermeir, Ronny Heiremans, Marc Boumeester

Platform for Artistic Research Sweden PARSE Journal Issue #4 Times Autumn 2016

PARSE Journal

Issue Editorial Team

Working Group

Dave Beech

Erling Björgvinsson Billes tryckeri

Ingrid Elam

Kanchan Burathoki

Anders Hultqvist

Ingrid Elam

Publisher

Andrea Phillips

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

University of Gothenburg

Andrea Phillips

ISSN 2002-0511

Mick Wilson

Online edition

Editor-in-chief Mick Wilson

www.parsejournal.com/journal

Project Manager Advisory Board

Mina Dennert

Simon Critchley

Front cover image Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The

Darla Crispin

Copy Edit

Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright

Vinca Kruk

Gerrie van Noord

the artists.

Valerie Pihet

Layout

Henk Slager

Anders Wennerström, Spiro

Gothenburg, the artists, photographers

Bruno Latour

and authors.

Table of contents Introduction Dave Beech, Ingrid Elam, Anders Hultqvist and Andrea Phillips

Towards a Purposeful Accident: Elements of Performance Art via The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes

What is the Time?

Jason E. Bowman with Anthony Howell

Bruno Latour

Zeitraum Times

Gerhard Eckel

Simon Critchley

Lecture Performance by The Otolith Group

The Conflict of Urban Synchronicity and its Heterotemporalities: Asynchronous Citizenship

Anjalika Sagar (Otolith Group) with Joel Sines

Atxu Amann y Alcocer and Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez

Shuffling Times

Nongkrong and Non-Productive Time in Yogyakarta’s Contemporary Arts

Who Does the Earth Think It Is?

Valérie Pihet and Benedikte Zitouni

Sonja Dahl

Flat Time House —Curating the Time-Base

Never Really in Real Time

John Hill and Claire Louise Staunton

Edgar Schmitz, Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans

Deep Decay: Into Diachronic Polychromatic Material Fictions

Eight Avatars of Time: An AffectiveTemporal Taxonomy of the Epistemology of Time beyond Chronology

Andy Weir

Marc Boumeester

Translating 51 Days: These Texts are not Memories A conversation between Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren and Jenny Tunedal

PARSE Journal

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Dave Beech

Ingrid Elam

Dave Beech is PARSE Professor of Art at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. He is the author of Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize. He is an artist in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan), whose work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial; the Liverpool Biennial; BAK, Utrecht; Wysing Arts, Cambridge; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; the ICA, London; the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; International Project Space, Birmingham; and 1000000mph Gallery, London.

Ingrid Elam is a Swedish writer and critic. She is a Professor in Literary composition and currently Dean of the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg and Chair of PARSE. She holds a PhD in Comparative literature since 1985. Between 1989 and 2000 she was the cultural editor of the Swedish newspapers iDAG, Göteborgs-Posten and Dagens Nyheter. From 2003 to 2012 she was employed at Malmö University, where, among other positions, she acted as the Dean of the School of Art and Communication.

Anders Hultqvist

Andrea Phillips

Anders Hultqvist is a composer, sound artist and Professor of Composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Besides writing for different orchestral, chamber music, electro-acoustic and sound art settings, he has since 2005 been involved in different artistic research projects concerning musical interpretation and sound in city spaces. The research projects “Transmission, Urban experiments in sound art and sonic space” and “Into noise” were undertaken by the research group USIT—The Urban Sound Institute. He is currently involved in the artistic research project “At the conceptual limits of composition: A shrinking emptiness – meaning, chaos and entropy”, which explores certain topics concerning the creation of meaning in musical and literary composition.

Dr Andrea Phillips is PARSE Professor of Art and Head of Research at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. Andrea lectures and writes on the economic and social construction of publics within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganisation within artistic and curatorial culture.

PARSE Journal

hen asked to respond to the question

unlocked through this particular time and that particular time in

“what is time?” for their presentation at the

a differential system of times. We can speak of the particu-

2015 PARSE conference on the theme, both

larity of time by mentioning the time of an exhibition or the

Bruno Latour and Simon Critchley deflected in their answer.

time of rest, but we can also refer to the era of the exhibition,

Latour asked “what is the time”, and Critchley made the locution

as Peter Osborne does, and the epoch of rest, as William

plural: times. In composite, and as an appropriate introduction

Morris did.2 Is this multiplication of times, these sequential and

to this issue of the PARSE Journal, with its complexity of artistic,

parallel times, the times that we prefer to time in general?

philosophical, political and social thought, we might ask: “what Certainly this is true of the contributors to the PARSE 2015

are the times?”

conference and those who have continued their explorations For Latour and for Critchley, time is a fiction of modernity,

in this issue of the journal. If there is any uniting factor, like

specifically European. As Latour says in his article, “[i]t is

Latour and Critchley the contributors reject any unification of

very difficult to situate oneself in time. Very few people are

time on the basis of its social, political, historical and aesthetic

contemporary of one another. And now we all have to decide

hegemony. If time equals unity, the artistic and philosophical

in which time we live.” Latour’s observation is urgent and

response on these pages is that such unity proscribes hier-

planetary in scale. His analysis of the limits of modernity are

archies, social and historical forms of power that must be

shaped by the constricted nature of the history of human-scale

repurposed to develop altered worlds. Here, the advantages

thinking and acting—of humanism per se. For Critchley, the

of artistic research emerge, especially when developed in

idea of time as uniform succession needs to be opposed “in

collaboration with other disciplines: as Valerie Pihet and

the name of a time which is reversible, intermittent, episodic,

Benedickte Zitouni say, what we need to do is “shuffle” times,

various and variable, pluriform, relative, relational, and, impor-

to reorder and reimagine both historical, anthropocentric and

tantly, finite.”

futurological time, using aesthetic and fictitious means. As The Otolith Group do in their contribution, in which, alongside stills

What are the times? Such a question has multiple inflections.

from their film Medium Earth (itself a meditation on the visuality

It refuses the commonplace, it locates both a historical and an

of deep time on the landscapes of Southern California), a

epistemological concern. The time is out of joint, says Shake-

performance script of both real and fictional “earthquake

speare’s Hamlet, the times are out of joint says Brecht’s Azdak

sensitives”—people who can sense the quake before it

in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Derrida’s hauntology begins

occurs—is reprinted.

with this concept of time out of joint. Ontology becomes 1

temporal and multiple: a hauntology is at least two points in

However, according to Doreen Massey, since the advent of

time that coincide in some troubling way. If the time is out of

phenomenology time and temporality have been consistently

joint, there are two or more times that do not sit well. In the

understood as more dynamic than space. Time, in effect,

conversation between Hanna Hallgren, Somaya El-Sousi and

has been relaunched strategically against the perceived

Jenny Tunedal in this issue, such out-of-jointness is rendered

metaphysical traps of space, objects, fixed structures and

palpable. Writing between Europe and Gaza in the summer

reified concepts. Time is the dimension through which actions

of 2014, talking through skype, they ask, what is the time of

are performed and events occur. Heidegger and Bergson

war? “Time to kill versus / Time to get killed or not.”

are the intellectual sources of a powerful train of thought in which space appears to be static and time appears to be the

Time is more abstract than times. The plural form has the

element that gives life to both space and creative renditions

advantage of addressing time through its instantiations rather

of the social world. The mistake of misrecognising the interde-

than its disembodied essence. Time understood as times is

pendencies of time and space, of the ways in which time and

INTRODUCTION

space become congealed in instances of “fact”, is noted in this

slower ones; the ‘others’.” Historians of work have charted the

issue by Marc Boumeester, as it leads to the supposition of the

processes by which the artisan was converted into a worker

unrelatedness of events: “Any category of cognitive dissonance,

through the disciplining of the use of time. Medieval workers

conceptual dislocatedness and emotional non-connectedness

were not paid by the hour and work was not measured in

seems to have its grounding in this concept, causing the

time. Christopher Hill observed that work for the generations

endless stream of mental and physical abuse, racism, hierarchi-

preceding the industrial revolution operated with a tempo of

cal misuse, moral injustice and pure criminal behaviour that has

“seasonal fits and starts”.3 Each hour was not equivalent but

been part of the chronology of humanity itself.”

occupied a differential place within a natural, customary and sacred matrix of time. At the threshold of the modern regime of

Deleuze has taught us to think in terms of becomings rather

work and the modern concept of time, John Locke complained

than beings in order to acknowledge the contingent dimension

that the poor will not work for more than two hours a day, and

of time. “Our time”, therefore, is the time of time. One of the

Sir Josiah Child lamented that the poor would not work more

distinguishing features of “our time” is that, in its conceptual

than two days a week.4

and philosophical productions, it seems allergic to abstraction, especially the great abstractions of metaphysics. The

Max Weber charted the transition from a traditional attitude

preference for the plurality of times over time in the singular

to work to the modern ethos of industry, which is a shift from

follows from this. Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben exemplify

agricultural and artisanal patterns of work to an industrial

the taboo on abstraction when they prefer to speak of various

urban regime of wage labour. On closer inspection, however,

dispositifs rather than the state. Time seems to be a trap under

it is time that is overhauled. Weber highlights how the

this philosophical regime. Yet, as many contributors to this issue

Calvinist ethos of hard work and condemnation of idleness

point out, such thought is marginal to the normative concept of

was accomplished by the introduction of the concept of time

progressive time—time with a future and a past—that governs

wasting.5 For Baxter, time wasting was a sin, whereas for

and determines the structure of our working day with its

Franklin every five shillings’ worth of time wasted was the

habitual reliances, profits and losses.

equivalent of tossing five actual shillings into the river. Two kinds of hell are implanted into the new experience of time.

As Atzu Amann y Alcocer and Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez point

Sonja Dahl’s description of Yogyakarta-based artists’ practice

out in this issue in their insistence that we grasp heterotem-

of “nongkrong”—literally “squatting by the side of the road

poralities, while it was the accurate timetabling of trains that

with a cigarette” or “sitting around because you’re not doing

established the uniformity of time between regions, it was the

any work”—contrasts with such Western Protestantism in a

introduction of wage labour that gave time its modern abstract

stark fashion: in her article she argues for the imperative of

character: “Ultimately, the urban environment and its synchroni-

time-wasting, not simply for artistic but also political reinvention

sation is the result of the fastest rhythms—related to production,

(Europe has its traditions here too: think of Surrealism and the

power and consumption—and cannot accommodate the

Situationist International).

1. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. New York, NY: Routledge. 1994.

4. John Locke quoted in Linebaugh, Peter. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Verso. p. 48; Sir Josiah Child quoted in Linebaugh, ibid., p. 4.

2. Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All. London: Verso. 2013. p. 167; Morris, William. ”News From Nowhere: An Epoch of Rest”. In News From Nowhere and Other Writings. Clive Wilmer (ed.) London: Penguin Books. 1993. 3. Hill, Christoper. Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. London: Penguin Books. 1986 (1964). p. 125.

5. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. 2001 (1930). p. 24.

PARSE Journal

Time occupies a central place for the curiosity and attention of

Indeed, one aspect of the transformation of a natural

practitioners and researchers across all the arts. The intensifi-

object, a stone, to an object of art is closely related to

cation of the question of time has, in recent years, prompted

our impact on matter. Artistic activity breaks the temporal

some to speak of a “temporal turn” across the disciplines.

symmetry of the object. […] We can no longer accept

Although bodies usually turn in space, the idiom of “turns”

the old a priori distinction between scientific and ethical

refers to events in time, markers of ruptures in time. This does

values. […] Today we know that time is a construction and

not make the “temporal turn” a redundancy or a logical error.

therefore carries an ethical responsibility.7

The temporal turn, or the time of time, of time being brought to a certain kind of alert consciousness and self-reflexivity, is

One aspect of this ethical responsibility is constituted around

an event that takes place in time as well as an event that has

how different cultural belief systems act as the foundation of

an impact on the concept of time itself. The performativity of

our different views on time. Compare for instance the concepts

this—the event and the concept performed synchronically—is

of time in the West with the Japanese or Hopi-Indian concepts

encapsulated by Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell’s

of space and time. As Latour points out here, our special

contribution to this issue in the form of a series of stills (and

Western concepts concerning the dynamics of time can in

full video documentation online) of the workshop Bowman

other languages and cultures be represented by totally different

organised leading up to the PARSE Time conference. It is also

words for the same timely situations being described.

encapsulated by Gerhard Eckel’s documentation and re-transcription of his sound work Zeitraum (a version of which was

When Andrew Weir in his article suggests with Siegfried

installed at the Time conference). Indeed, both contributions,

Zelinski that “the idea of geological deep time is so foreign to

with their editorial challenge to the very idea of producing a

us we can only understand it as metaphor […] To be ‘stunned’

printed journal following on from a live event, have instigated

by deep time is to focus on the attendant sense of human awe

for us not simply a conceptual but also a pragmatic challenge:

and wonder at such cosmic timescales”, we can remember

how to adequately enunciate the complexity of such interven-

what Italo Calvino wrote in connection to Leopardi and our

tions of the time (then, and now, as you read) without reducing

cognitive limitations:

the acuity of intervention to the time so fundamentally disputed Leopardi went on thinking about the problem aroused by

by all our contributors?

the composition of L’infinito. In his reflections, two terms are Time is generated by symmetry breaking; breaks create

constantly compared: the “indefinite” [indefinito, without

memory—memory creates time. “Memories are just storages,

limit] and the “infinite” [infinito, without end]. […] But since

and they follow forwards causality as well as all other storing”

the human mind cannot conceive the infinite, and in fact

Murray Gell-Mann writes. Increasingly intricate structures lead

falls back aghast at the very idea of it, it has to make

to the experience that psychological time is also becoming

do with what is indefinite, with sensations as they mingle

more divided. The degree of complexity, which thus is

together and create an impression of infinite space.8

dependent on time, is proportional to the amount of information present in the system. The conceptual metaphors extend

Even if quantum probabilities are seen as the foundations of

the mental (conceptual) room and thereby also introduce more

time, by implying a basic asymmetric relationship between

time.

past and future through its probability functions (and transferring order from these initial conditions to later organisational

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers write in their book Order

forms), we still have to make it work together with our different

out of Chaos:

psychological chronotopes. Maybe our tendency to synthesise so many aspects of reality within one word just makes us more

INTRODUCTION

bewildered? Time-related quantities and qualities are mixed

relatable. Importantly for Latham, the ‘incidental person’, often

in a way that often adds to the conceptual confusion. There

an artist, is an observer who can both enact events and

seems to be a need to be at the same time more precise and

be sensitive to them beyond anthropocentric perceptions of

more inclusive in our conceptions on how we create and are

passing time.”

created by our concepts around time. Perhaps it is time, at least within Western culture, to make some kind of atonement

Most art forms can now be thought of as time-based. But the

between evolutionary time and entropic time. Between

temporal turn, if we are to embrace such an idea (which in

psychological time and geo-history. But again: not by limiting

itself might be said to be caught in the logic of progressive

the amount of times but by making the concepts around

time) does not simply describe the structure of art practition-

time richer. Valérie Pihet: “Linear time literally immobilises

ers’ work—be it in film, crafting, dance, composition or

us, preventing us from seeking out the ‘possibles’ necessarily

installation—but the concern of artists regarding the structure

contained in a situation […], a problem without a solution is a

of their work—how it takes place in the world and how it is

badly formulated problem. There is always something to be

conditioned by that taking place. As Edgar Schmitz says in his

done when the problem is that of life.” And Benedicte Zitouni

conversation with Vermeir & Heiremans in this issue, “[t]his is

writes in the same article: “How to make things present, how

not a question of precedence between symbolic, financial and

to trigger in and through the story-telling, is the key question for

institutional registers… but rather a question of how can one

those storytellers who want to thicken our present and multiply

temporarily subsume the other. This is an escapist attitude, one

its possibilities and potentialities.”

of subterfuge, rather than one of analytical engagement.”

Maybe “time” in its present form as an “epistemic object”

Art objects have life breathed into them through the activities

has to change, or at least combine, its interior and exterior

of curators, critics, teachers and viewers, but also by cleaners,

structure? If time is causal relations, and ultimately born out

maintenance workers and security guards, who provide the

of quantum uncertainty, also human beings and how they

physical conditions for the work to appear timeless (as Mierle

handle the (anthropocentric) Earth are dynamic products of that

Laderman Ukeles so precisely demonstrated in Maintenance

initial condition. As Andrew Weir writes quoting Ray Brassier:

Art Tasks, in which she cleaned the objects, interiors and

“thought is embedded in the reality which it seeks to know.”

exterior of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut in 1973—time in this sense, is importantly and often unre-

What would happen if we were able to obliterate the binary

markably gendered and ethnicised through labour). Artists

division between scientific and lived time(s); if there existed

are concerned with the event of their work and increasingly

only one “time” in the sense that there is only a dynamic

structure happening in time as a core research question—a

plenitude of “times”? In their article concerning John Latham’s

core aesthetic and also, as our contributors assert, a political

Flat Time House, Claire Staunton and John Hill write that:

point of departure. This issue of PARSE Journal seeks to

“[…] all events—physical, cultural, or psychological—can be

examine such interventions into, of and through the times.

measured and related to one another (this is what Latham

Artists across disciplines have the advantage of shuffling,

meant as ‘flat time’). Art and physics are infinitely inter-

overcoming, undermining, fictionalising time.

6. Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar. New York, NY: Holt. 1994. p. 225.

8. Calvino, Italo. Six memos for the next millenium. London: Penguin Classics. 2009. pp. 62-63.

7. Prigogine, Ilya, and Stengers, Isabelle. Order out of Chaos. London: Flamingo (Fontana Paperbacks). 1985. p. 312.

PARSE Journal

Abstract For the 2015 PARSE conference on Time, Bruno Latour and Simon Critchley discussed shifting concepts of time and their impact on developments in art, philosophy and the social sciences in a conversation moderated by Mick Wilson. In preparation for this event, PARSE put the following questions to them: • What is time? • Time arguably has always been at the centre of the research initiatives of the natural sciences, of philosophy and of the many different practices of history and social criticism. However, time also occupies a central place for the curiosity and attention of artist researchers across all the arts. The intensification of the question of time has, in recent years, prompted some to speak of a “temporal turn” across the disciplines. What is your perspective on this relative interest? • What is your understanding of the ways in which cultural practice relates to questions of time? • What are chronopolitics for you? • Many of the proposals we received for the conference seek to engage with the crisis of “anthropocenic”. You have both engaged in different ways with this issue—could you elaborate? • We are currently embedded in a temporality that is shaped in large part by the instantaneity of global capital. How do you see the affects of this? • How can this be understood historically and philosophically? • Is time gendered? What might it mean to think time in relation to the question of gender? • Much recent theoretical discourse has focused on the “end of time”. What is your view of this?

What is the Time? Times

Bruno Latour

Simon Critchley

Bruno Latour is a philosopher, sociologist of science and anthropologist. He is especially known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies and for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated with researchers in science policy and research management. Latour is Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, after five years (2007-2012) as the Vice-President for Research. While at Sciences Po, he created the médialab to seize the opportunity offered to social theory through the spread of digital methods, and, together with Valérie Pihet, he has created a new experimental programme in art and politics.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at the European Graduate School. His many books include Very Little… Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), The Faith of the Faithless (2012), and, with Tom McCarthy, The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society (2012). A book on Hamlet called Stay, Illusion!, co-authored with Jamieson Webster, was published in 2013 by Pantheon Books in the US and Verso in the UK. An experimental new work, Memory Theatre, is forthcoming. Critchley writes for The Guardian and is moderator of “The Stone”, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.

PARSE Journal

What is the Time? Bruno Latour I decided to solve the question “what is time?” by shifting it slightly to “what is the time in which we stand?” This is actually a very famous image of les mots historiques that we read when we were kids. “We are dancing on a volcano”, which is one way of—at that time of course—referring to a political upheaval, the one that brought Louis Philippe to the kingdom in France. Now, of course, the volcano is no longer a sort of metaphor, it’s more literal. Another answer to the question of what is the time in which we are, has been given by Nature, the journal, which in March 2015 called, rather strangely, a period the “human age”. Except the human age is not the face of humanity in a traditional way, but as an artist rendition on the page. As you can see, it’s a man’s face made of layers of sediment and fossil as if we were a different human.

Cartoon “Nous dansons sur un volcan”

So, if you look at this image, to define the time in which we are, which is also called the Anthropocene, we have to meet a fairly strange character. A character, a face of a person made of stones, which is offering a different face of a human, and, of course, a completely different time, because the human which is supposed to be a geological force is also a human with a much longer history than the history of what is called history by historians, meaning the beginning of time when we had traces. Deep history, if you want. This is a history that Dipesh Chakrabarty calls geo-history. What is so interesting in the face shown in the image is that it has some connection with very traditional ways of understanding what it is to be of this earth. Of course, not the earth of minerals, of fossils, of coal, but an earth nonetheless. This is a second aspect of the answer to the question what is the time. It is certainly not a time forwards, moving forwards. It is a time that has a strange and somewhat surprising position of situating us in a new fraternity with cultures of a past, which are no longer “of the past”. Cultures, which seem simultaneously to be very close to us now, because we share their embodiment and earthliness in a way that was not visible before, when in the twentieth century we believed we were in a time moving forwards and we left behind us the other cultures. Compare

Richard Monastersky, “The Human Age”, Nature, No. 519, 12 March 2015

Bruno Latour AND Simon Critchley

tradition, while at the same time we, in Europe and in the West, were moving backwards. So the time where we are is very strange. It is very difficult to situate oneself in time. Very few people are contemporary of one another. And now we all have to decide in which time we live. This is a problem picked up by many artists. Not necessarily artists using very elaborate media. Philippe Squarzoni, who is a graphic novelist, tried to capture

Sydney Parkinson, “Maori ta Moko”, 1769. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The Nggwal Bunafunei Spirit House, Elaf Hamlet”, 1972. From The Cassowary’s Revenge (1997) by Donald F. Tuzin. Copyright of Malcolm Kirk, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N Y.

the image of the earthly man with this Maori face painted in the traditional way. Or look at this image of an architecture now destroyed of a civilisation that produced a collective representation of itself.

the spirit of the time—the zeitgeist—by looking at what happens when you are a graphic novelist specialising in a political topic and suddenly you hear that something is happening to the earth, but you don’t know how accurate it is. How you can’t make sense of it because it’s too big, it’s too new and there are people who say that it is all disputed. The whole of Squarzoni’s novel is an attempt to make sense of information about the earth. Basically, trying to make sense of information such as that in the article of Nature, which is trying to get at what it means having the earth coming back to you. It is a novel about the difficulty of absorbing the novelty of its time, a novel about how we cope with the disconnect between the news coming from science and the extraordinarily feeble instrument we have in our own sensibility and imagination. What is funny is that most of the book is actually about scientists

Here we can see a beautiful image that has been shown by Don Tuzin in his study of the Arapesh in New Guinea. It depicts a whole society building its house, called a House of Spirits during a very elaborate ritual. The very act of building such an elaborate emblem of who they are was essential for defining themselves. This culture has been totally destroyed as Tuzin tells in his book. The principle of building such a house was actually destroyed in a grand gesture of abandonment of their own cultures by the Arapesh themselves, once they had met their evangelical pastors. So they themselves moved into our time, abandoned their life, destroyed their

PARSE Journal

Stephany Ganachaud, “The Angel of Geostory”, 2013, video still.

being interviewed. So you have pages after pages of talking heads in a graphic novel, which is very odd. But this is also a way of absorbing the novelty of a situation in which the author is trying to constantly compare the paraphernalia of feelings and memory we have in order to see how we can measure them up to the new situation in which we find ourselves. I want to demonstrate a change of position vis-à-vis the time. On the two sides of the screen is the same dancer. The camera is in different positions, but it is the same movement. It is the movement of what I call The Angel of Geostory (with allusion to Benjamin of course). She flees, she looks behind her and then she looks forwards, she stops and she looks—what has she done, why is she fleeing? Then she looks up and

what she sees seems to be even more terrifying than what she had left when she was fleeing. She even begins to do little gestures of fleeing as if she was going back to the movement. This movement is very simple but it shows the difficulty of approaching the question, what is time? I have translated this to “what is the time in which we are” because the time that we were when we were fleeing what we used to call the future, is completely different from the one that she sees coming towards her. Of course, what is coming to us is this word, the Anthropocene—a very disputed term that defines the time simultaneously as time in history, human history and the time in geology (which the two disciplines invented at the same time in the eighteenth century). Then they split; geology was one and human history was another, but now they are merging. But they have very different definitions of time. Now we have this extraordinary situation in which geologists are trying to find a date for the Anthropocene. This date is, of course, 16 July 1945: simultaneously a date of geology and in human history—the date of atomic markers triggered by the atomic bomb. You might notice that the first author of that paper is a geologist, a stratigrapher called Jan Zalasiewicz. The last author is Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science. It is amazing to have a paper of geology

Simon L. Lewis, and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519.12 March 2015 (2915): 171-80.

The Beginning of the Anthropocene.

Bruno Latour AND Simon Critchley

published with one of the authors a historian of science and the other a stratigrapher. What is interesting and directly related to the topic of time is that there is a huge dispute on how to date this Anthropocene. There is a paper by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin in which there are a lot of different times.1 One of them is 1610, stated as a possible beginning of the Anthropocene. Why 1610? Because that is the moment when CO2 is known to have a much lower level than now. Why is this decrease of CO2? It turns out that reforestation of a whole American continent, one century of reforestation, massively absorbed the CO2. But why is there reforestation at such massive scale? Of course, it was the elimination of 50 million Indians due to the Colombian exchange of microbes so that whole areas which had been open had been

reforested. But 1610 is disputed of course. There are several other candidates. What is not very much disputed is what Crutzen and others call the Great Acceleration.2 What is the difference between the footprint of humans taken globally today—human as anthropos, as a race on the earth—and the footprint of humans in 1900 and even in 1950? In 1950, the footprint was very, very small. So this is what we have occupied in terms of footprint in this very, very limited period of time between now and then. In a paper by Steffen and others, researchers try to capture as much as possible about how the great acceleration is composed.3 What is interesting and typical of the Anthropocene at the time in which we are is that the authors mixed socio-economic variables, very classical ones like energy use and so on, with ones which are coming from past natural science.

1 Lewis, Simon L. and Maslin, Mark A. “Defining the Anthropocene”. Nature. No. 519. March 2015. 2 Steffen, W., Crutzen, J. and McNeill, J.R. “The Anthropocene: are humans now overcoming the great forces of Nature?”. Ambio. Vol. 36. No. 8. December 2007. 3 Ibid.

Tomás Saraceno. “On Space Time Foam”, 2012. Installation view, Hangar Bicocca, Milan. Curated by Andrea Lissoni. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa; Esther Schipper, Berlin. © Photography by Alessandro Coco and Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2012.

Earth system trends: The Great Acceleration 3, Steffen et al. (2015), The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration, The Anthropocene Review.

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4 See http://blogs.sciencespo.fr/speap/ (Accessed 2016-07-14.) 5 Make It Work, le théâtre des négociations, see http:// www.cop21makeitwork. com/ (Accessed 2016-07-14.)

We ourselves—humans—are becoming connected, hooked up at a scale and on the span of geological forces. That of course has a very important aspect also on space. In Milan in 2012 Tomás Saraceno tried to capture what it is to be in this new space-time, which is as if you are suspended in the plastic foam, so to speak, and you cannot move on foot, because every time you move you have to actually crawl, in this very strange space which is under pressure. (There are three layers so you are actually separated as if you were flies glued onto this plastic foam.) It’s a very, very powerful rendering of the difficulty of being in this new space-time, which, of course, some people enjoy but I found extremely distressing. This connection between research coming from science and research coming from art doesn’t have to protect the identity, freedom and integrity of artists at all. On the contrary, it is a great occasion to lose this autonomy, freedom and specificity of artists so that we try now to become more like Squarzoni, like Saraceno, like many others, exposed to the difficulty, which is a common difficulty brought to us by scientists about which time we are in. We need to find new ways of teaching and representing these issues. In May 2015, at SPEAP 4, we tried to find what I called the Parliament of Things many years ago, by making representative not only the nation state—not only the United States, or Canada, or England or Sweden—but the former elements of nature.5

Here you see women representing endangered species and others representing the soil. Of course, this is just a simulation, but I think we have to multiply the simulations to get the third meaning of aesthetics, which is representation in the political sense. There are three—the one of science, getting sensitive to what happened to the volcanoes, the climate; the one of art, which is making, building our own sensitivity to the event; and of course, the aesthetics of politics. So I think we can answer the question, what is the time. The time in which we are is very, very close to the time of the sixteenth century. We are actually in the sixteenth century. Not because we discovered a new land, emptied of Indians by contingencies, by assassinations and conquest, but we still discovered a new land. The new land is not an extension, it is not a new land in space exactly; it is the same old land, that is, the land which is beneath our feet. It has the name of earth (like in the film Erth we just saw by John Latham) and this earth strangely enough, is not very well known. So the people who actually always claim the earth to be mundane, material, matter of fact, suddenly discover that the new earth that is coming at us is completely different from traditions of materials. Materialities, territories—all of that is going to change. So it is, in a way, back to the sixteenth century.

Bruno Latour AND Simon Critchley

Times Simon Critchley Question: What is time? Simon Critchley: Difficult question, for at one level we know what time means in various ways (time to get up, time to work, time to play, time to sleep, time to sleep during the conference or whatever), but the nature of the time that we know and are completely familiar with is deeply enigmatic to us (it has been like this since Augustine posed the question). The problem with the question “what is time?” is that it presupposes that time is something that has a being, firstly, and that it only has one being: time is x or y and is one. Maybe that presupposition is fallacious, maybe we live and move within manifold and various dimensions of time. Maybe we should say not that time is, but that times are, as a first step. The time of sleep or dreams is not the same as the time of breakfast or the time of listening to music, or the time of waiting for something or the time of this conversation. Time in Gothenburg is not the same as time in New York or Azerbaijan. Time shifts, flexes and twists. It is malleable, elastic, splendidly relative and relational. However, this is not the way time is usually viewed. And this is where Bruno Latour and I agree, I think. The dominant way of thinking about time is in terms of an arrow, an arrow of time, pointing towards the future; it is future-oriented, progressivist, indeed revolutionary. What is characteristic of the modern is a teleological, progressivist conception of time (which borrows from and secularises theological concep-

tions of time that are found largely in Christian ideas of providence). This is the idea of time “that passes irreversibly and annuls the entire past in its wake”.1 It is this conception of time that has to be placed in question and placed in question fundamentally. This concept of time finds its degree zero, a quintessential modern expression, in Kant. It is expressed early on in the Critique of Pure Reason in the transcendental aesthetic. In this view, time only has one dimension, which is succession: one moment succeeds another. Time is uniform: it is now (i.e. the present), no-longer-now (i.e. the past) and notyet-now (i.e. the future), and it flows in one direction, from past to future. Time is a uniform succession of nows that are unlimited, indeed infinite; there will always be more nows. Time is constant, as it is measured by the now, now now now, and—very importantly—time is irreversible, you can’t retrieve the past. The now that is gone is gone for good, but there will always be another now, anytime now. It is this idea of time as uniform succession, as infinite, constant and irreversible, that I think Latour and I both oppose. But in the name of what? For me, in the name of a time which is reversible, intermittent, episodic, varous and variable, pluriform, relative, relational, and, importantly, finite. Rather than thinking of time as a line or an arrow, we can think of it as a loop or a series of loops, as a spiral or series of spirals. This is a time which is various, multiple. If time is anything, then it is times. This idea of time as a spiral, loop or series of loops is something that art

1. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1993. p.47.

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2. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. 1962. p.471. 3. Latour, op. cit.

can show particularly well. Think for example of Chris Marker’s La Jetée or Sans Soleil. This idea of time as a loop or spiral rather than a line is something that we know, or knew, very well, in the sense of time being linked to the looping movement of the sun and sky. This is something Heidegger says very well in an odd moment in Being and Time: “time first shows itself in and as the sky”.2 The sky is bright, it’s time to wake up, or the sky is dark and we should drink beer (or wine, if you like) and then sleep. But why limit it to the sky? In Swedish, time is tid, time as period, span, term, but also space (the relations between time and space is essential and beautifully interesting). But what is buried in tid is the idea of time as tide, as the movement not just of sky but tide, of the sea, of the repeated, looping, shifting, but never identical motion of maritime (of the mari-time) tides, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing. Here time is physical, the movement of sun and moon and sea; it is not in our heads, or the form of inner sense as Kant says, but this time is also not objective in the sense of something existent and measureable independently of us in digital clocks. But to say that time is not objective is not to conclude that time is subjective. Time, the time of a world or of worlds, is more objective than any object and more subjective than any subject. You cannot reduce the sky or sea to an object and our psychical sense of time is prior to any account of subjectivity. Time is a question of what Latour calls the Middle Kingdom, between subjects and objects, the times of quasi-objects and quasi-

subjects.3 But it is here that we happen to live. Time is physical in the sense that it first shows itself in the sky, and we can link this, I think, to ideas of time as physis and gaia, and this time is also us in the most primary way. We are time and this sense of time is linked to world, to the network of entities that make up a world and an earth. I think we have here some of the elements for an earthly idea of time which I take it Latour is trying to get us to think and live. Q: Time arguably has always been at the centre of the research initiatives of the natural sciences, of philosophy and of the many different practices of history and social criticism. However, time also occupies a central place for the curiosity and attention of artist researchers across all the arts. The intensification of the question of time has, in recent years, prompted some to speak of a “temporal turn” across the disciplines. What is your perspective on this relative interest? SC: I’m suspicious of all talk of turns, because they tend to presuppose the idea of time as an arrow that both Latour and I want to criticise. Turn-talk can be an aspect of the culture industry or ideological production that I want to place in question. It’s like when people talked of the postmodern turn a generation ago. I’m dubious about it. I’m also dubious about when some artists say “I’m working on time”. It’s as if they know what time is and they are working with it. This risks being vague and trendy or vaguely trendy, a façon de parler, little more. At that point, I want to ask: which conception of time are you working on, if one can indeed work on time (maybe times work

Bruno Latour AND Simon Critchley

on us). I want to know what that artist is doing with time. Namely, what is their story, what is their fiction, what is their mythology of time and how does it subvert this ideology of the arrow of time? At that point, I think matters can get more interesting. I think this idea of story, fiction or myth is what artists really mean when they say “I am working on time”. Q: What is your understanding of the ways in which cultural practice relates to questions of time? SC: Cultural practice relates to and always has to relate to questions of time, but again it is a question of which thought or thoughts of time one employs. If one is using or assuming the standard, progressivist conception of time then we risk getting nowhere. With the kind of pluriform, finite, intermittent idea of time that I recommend to you, time or rather times do not come in succession: the future is no later than the past and the present is something inherently unstable. Times are happening at the same time, disturbing our usual idea of time. Q: What are chronopolitics for you? SC: If chronopolitics is the name for the way in which time relates to politics and political decisionmaking, then nothing is more important than the politics of time. I would suggest that we begin with Hamlet, when he says early in the play that the time is out of joint. This is a political statement made during a time of war (and it is during a time of war that ghosts appear on the battlements of the castle, of Elsinore and our various castles). There is a disjuncture of time and, for me, because of my aesthetic prejudices, this is what theatre best enacts. The idea of the disjunture of time throws any teleological conception of time suddenly and massively into reverse. We could express this in a formula: to say the time is out of joint is to say that the past is not past, the future folds back upon itself and the present is shot through with the fluxions of past and future that destabilise it. Future, past and present are simulta-

neously “present”, as it were. The three ecstases of time are at work on us and in us at the same time, which breaks open how we think about time. This is what takes place in Hamlet, in Sopocles’ Oedipus, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, and everywhere theatre happens. Q: Many of the proposals we received for this conference seek to engage with the crisis of “anthropocenic” time. You and Latour have engaged in different ways with this issue—could you elaborate? SC: I think that the crisis of anthropocenic time is that of the Kantian, modernist idea of time. This conception of time is not benign in its effects. It leads to the crazy idea that the West is ahead of the rest, has a different temporal structure to the rest—captured in the idea of modernity and somehow physically located in Western Europe— and to the even crazier idea that we can solve the crisis of climate change by not changing the conception of time that got us into this mess in the first place. The first thing we need to do is to rethink our conception of time, which will also lead us to question the privilege that we give to concepts like crisis. I’m sceptical about crisis talk, because it uses exactly this traditional, modernist, and I think degraded, idea of time. We could also link this to Latour’s critique of the idea of revolution and revolutionary change, which is the only way in which modernity could account for change. We’re better off without it. Q: We are currently embedded in a temporality that is shaped in large part by the instantaneity of global capital. How do you see the affects of this? How can this be understood historically and philosophically? SC: The problem with capital talk is that it uses or piggybacks on exactly the linear, progressivist conception of time that we need to place in question. Indeed, one of the problems with Marx, but more so with Marxists, is their fidelity to a theology of progress, revolution and the rest. I think that talk of capital is something wonderfully reassuring to

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people on the Left. Ah, it’s capital. It is like God talk or Nature talk or Providence talk. It is as if capital has a divine agency, which it clearly doesn’t. It is a consequence of political decisions and it is these that we need to question with a fresh and vital new series of political decisions. It has multiple and complex political agencies which we need to understand and challenge. We need much more complex, situated and local forms of explanation in order to resist or rethink ideas of “global capital”. The question of the global is also reached too quickly, as if we know what the globe is. In other words, talk of global capital is too monistic or totalising. Here, I agree with Latour; what we need is a notion of earthliness which is not totalising or monistic, more of a flat, open network than a seamless quasi-divine force. I think, in all humility, that another conception of time could lead us to think differently about capitalism and to political responses to it, which would be perhaps more anarchistic, at least for me. This is, as Latour always insists, a question of composition, a word I very

much like in his vocabularly. We need to compose an earthly politics rather than presuppose a conception of the global, even global capital. Q: Is time gendered? What might it mean to think time in relation to the question of gender? SC: Yes, it is. It is different for men and women. Obviously, a previous generation thought about the question of gender and time in terms of what was called “women’s time” (for example, the time of birth rather than the male obsession with death). There is nothing wrong with that. But it seems to me that we need to compose a more complex account of the relation between time and gender. What is the question of gender? How many genders are there? I think this becomes less and less clear in a way that is more and more interesting. Think about the way in which questions (plural) of gender have become more nuanced in relation to questions of intersex identity or trans categories. One place to start would be listening to Gothenburg’s The Knife:

Bruno Latour AND Simon Critchley

“Let’s talk about gender baby. Let’s talk about you and me”. (I had to get one reference to The Knife in this event. As they said in their last concert in Reyjavik, postcolonial gender politics comes first, music comes second.)4 Q: Much recent theoretical discourse has focused on the “end of time”. What is your view of this? SC: I wish we could put an end to the talk of the end of time, but that is just as teleological and apocalyptic a claim as that which it is seeking to oppose. The idea of the end of time is theological, linked to the idea of end times, the last days etc. etc. I see this kind of talk as a form of crypto-theological reassurance that wants to avoid the hard task that we are facing, which is how to compose a politics that responds to the complex context of the anthropocene. There are two things I really hate and which I think are wrong: firstly, the idea that we can address the anthropocene and save ourselves and the globe with exactly the kind of linear, modernist conception of

time that got us into this problem in the first place. And secondly, more controversially, the idea that we are fucked, that there is nothing to do and we’re living in the end times. We get off on this sense of pessimistic doom far too much (why do we like doom so much?) and fall back into a neo-Schopenhauerian pessimism. We seem to delight in wallowing in our own powerlessness. We are not powerless. We seem to like feeling fucked in this way. Maybe we shouldn’t like it so much.

4. See http://pitchfork.com/ features/interview/9092-theknife/ (Accessed 2016-0713.)

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Abstract For the 2015 PARSE Time conference The Otolith Group screened Medium Earth (2013) and followed this by the performance of a semi-fictional radio conversation between earthquake sensitives and philosophers in the US. Part prequel and part premonition, Medium Earth is a work caught within its own imminent future and represents the outgrowth of research undertaken throughout California in 2012-2013. It listens to its deserts, translates the writing of its stones, and deciphers the calligraphies of its expansion cracks. The accumulation of moving images and sounds that make up Medium Earth comprise an audiovisual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, Medium Earth participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval. The conversation, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Earthquake Sensitive as Planetary Subjectâ&#x20AC;? with image backdrop of slides from Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (2014), was performed by Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines.

Who Does the Earth Think It Is?

Anjalika Sagar

Joel Sines

Anjalika Sagar is one of the members of the collaborative platform The Otolith Group along with Kodwo Eshun, which was founded in 2002. The Group sets out to rethink the dynamics of cultural production under conditions of accelerated, unstable and precarious global environments. This endeavour finds eclectic forms including films, artworks, exhibitions, curated programmes, and publications that are conceived as ongoing research into the structures of global regimes, speculative futures, tricontinentalism, and cybernetics. Their work in particular has focused on audiovisual essays as an expanded form that seek to inhabit events and histories that inform our present and future, geology and collective unconscious.

Joel Sines trained as an actor and theatre director at Academia Contemporânea do Espetáculo, in Porto. He has led an intense artistic practice in the realm of theatre, cinema and performance art through research and practice both in Portugal and the UK. He has collaborated with visual artists and directors such as Ângela Ferreira, João Sousa Cardoso, Giorgio Sadotti, Claudio da Silva and Bruno Schiappa. Sines is co-founder of the performance collective Ma Companhia (Bad Company) based in Porto. He recently moved to London, where he was admitted to the Open School East Associates Programme in 2015.

PARSE Journal Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright the artists.

Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines

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Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright the artists.

PARSE Journal

Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright the artists.

Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright the artists

PARSE Journal

Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright the artists.

Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines

Lecture Performance by The Otolith Group1 Read by Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group (AS) and Joel Sines (JS).

START AS: Welcome to Night Search. It’s 7pm on March 2nd, 2013. I’m Eddie Middleton, here in Memphis, Justin Abner is up in Pigeon Forks, Tennessee, and we’re interviewing Charlotte King tonight. She is a famous biological sensitive who has been able to predict earthquakes quite accurately, and she has amazing abilities. She is able to pick up on frequencies that most people can’t experience. Charlotte, I know you do a lot of other things that you’re noted for, but I guess the main thing is the earthquake predictions. And, just to start out, I want to welcome you to Night Search and ask you to maybe fill in a little bit about your background, how you first got started with this earthquake prediction thing, so that our listeners, who maybe are not familiar with you, can know something about your background. JS: It’s a pleasure to be talking with you, Justin, down there in Memphis. In 1981, or 1980 I should say, I connected with the mountain, here in California, and when St. Helen’s started getting active, I started getting really bad headaches, which actually started back about 1979. And I didn’t know why. They, you know, did tests and stuff, and everything was fine medically. So I basically just had headaches all the time, migraines, and nobody knew what it was. I was seeing specialists and given medication and stuff. Nothing would help. And then they had the first earthquake on Mount St. Helen’s in March, March 16th 1980,

and my head felt like it was gonna blow up. Then when the volcano had the first earthquake, the pain subsided just briefly, and I said, “ah, it’s the volcano”. And from that point on, I was locked into Mount St. Helen’s. I still am. I can feel it from anywhere, from where I’m now, 90 miles away, to when I was in Colorado, almost 2,000 miles away or more. So it’s just really a connection with the Earth. And what really put it all together for me in 1979 was the beaching of the whales here in Oregon. There were a series of sound changes. I was really scared. I didn’t know why, I started crying. I called the television station up in Portland that I was reporting information to, and they said nothing was happening. And then that evening, about four hours after the call, they interrupted the television station to talk about a series of sperm whales that were beaching on the Oregon coast. In all, 41 beautiful giant mammals beached and died. When the sound changed, they beached, and then four days later, three to four days later, there were four moderate earthquakes in Big Bear, California. It just all clicked for me at that point, and I knew that I was feeling earthquakes, at least in the United States. I didn’t know too much about other areas yet. And as time progressed, I not only had sound changes, but I also had physical symptoms. Each part of my body is tied in to a different geographical location. I’m not unique in this. The only unique thing was I was able to put it together, because there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that feel these things. They just don’t know what they’re feeling. And some can hear some things. Some can feel some things. Some do both. Very few do both. Most of the people that hear it, hear it in the higher

1. This lecture performance was read at the PARSE conference 2015 on Time. It is based on research carried out by The Otolith Group as part of their film Medium Earth and features real and fictional accounts by earthquake sensitives.

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frequency, whereas I hear in the subsonic sound level, which most people do not, although there are a couple people that do. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in Oregon or in Tennessee or in Wyoming or in Japan or China or Chile. It doesn’t make any difference. The sounds and the symptoms are almost always the same. That way you can identify where the next event’s going to take place.

gave myself permission to go out to my car, get my laptop, and send out an alert for Japan.

AS: Let me ask you: the tsunami that hit Japan a couple years ago and destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reactor—did you pick up on that?

JS: Oh, no, not at all. Obviously, I’ve not been 100%. Some of the great big ones that I felt were going to happen, were maybe a day or two late. There’s been three times or four times that I’ve missed one. But then the precursors continued, and then it did show up. So it was, wasn’t that it didn’t happen. The precursors that I watch continued to happen, so it moved the timeline out accordingly, and my groups know how that works. So, but it’s just each time you have an event, you move the timeline out another day or two beyond what the timeline was originally set on. And it’s kind of hard to explain, but anyway, that’s what I do. I always say ahead of time, you know, the timeline when it’s going to be. Mount St. Helen’s, I’m 100%. Japan, I’m 100%. Mexico, I’m 100%. Oregon, I’m 100%. Chile, I’m definitely 100%. There are some, you can miss…

JS: That is right, Eddie. Oh, absolutely. There was about three days of precursor activity for that. Japan always left shoulder blade pain, and if it’s over a six, which obviously this was, it’s sharp, jabby heart pain on the left side of the chest. It feels like a knife just going in and out, just sharp, little jabbies, quite uncomfortable, but not severe. And also animals react to Japan if it’s over a six. Cats start vomiting. Mostly it’s fur balls, but after a while, it’s not even fur balls. When you have one cat that throws up a fur ball, as you know, that’s not a big deal. But when you have all of your cats doing it at the same time, then it is a big deal. I also have ants that I keep a very close watch on. They’re my kind of backup precursor group here. And before the quake in Japan, they were climbing up the wall in droves, literally thousands of them, and up over the ceiling. They did not want to be in the ground at all. The morning of the earthquake, I went to go to work, I was still working at that time, opened the garage door, and the whole driveway surface was littered with dozens of earthworms that had crawled out of the ground. And I said, “uh-oh”. So I had to move a bunch of them before I could back my car out. I went on to work, I went upstairs into the office, and there are four steps going up that are concrete, and then you have the landing to go in the door. And the earthworms had climbed those four concrete stairs. There were still some on the bottom steps. And they had made it all the way to the top landing and were laying all over the landing up there, just to get away from the ground. And that’s when I

AS: Wow… I got to ask you this. I know you’ve been doing earthquake predictions based on these kind of biological symptoms since 1979. How accurate have you been, if you don’t mind talking about your track record of success to date?

AS: Charlotte, can you tell us, is there anything right now going on that would… precursors that indicate some major quake in some place in the world that, that you… JS: Well, we’re expecting—Oregon’s stirring a little bit, because the vision’s getting really bad, and Oregon is always vision. And I’m not concerned. It’s just probably an aftershock to the five we had a couple days ago. Left lower ribs and back are hurting again. That’s Oceania, probably New Zealand, Australia, in that area, because they’re due, they’re also due for an aftershock, that’s the area that’s been real uncomfortable lately. And my right knee and and hip and my leg has been hurting, and that’s Peru, Brazil, and Colombia.

Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines

AS: Okay. Okay. Handing over to Justin now. JS: Justin Abner here in Pigeon Forks, Tennessee. I just wanted to bring in our second guest who’s been waiting patiently all this time over in Pacific Palisades. Professor Theodor Adorno. Professor Adorno. Are you there? AS: I am here, yes. JS: Great you could join us. Now I understand that you have been conducting up-to-the-minute content analysis of the three months of the daily column “Astrological Forecasts” by the astrologist Carroll Righter in the Los Angeles Times from November 1952 to February 1953. AS: That is correct, yes. JS: I understand that this is brand new up-to-the-minute research that you have just completed in this year of 1953. Can you share some of your findings with us? AS: Our social system, in spite of its closedness and the ingenuity of its technological functioning, seems to actually move towards self-destruction. The sense of an underlying crisis has never disappeared since World War I and most people realise, at least dimly, that the continuity of the social process and somehow of their own capacity of reproducing their life, is no longer due to supposedly “normal” economic processes, but to factors such as universal rearmament, which by themselves breed destruction while they are apparently the only means of selfperpetuation. This sense of threat is real enough, and some of its expressions such as the A and H bombs are about to outrun the wildest neurotic fears and destructive fantasies. The more people profess official optimism, the more profoundly they are affected by this mood of doom, the idea, correct or erroneous, that the present state of affairs somehow must lead towards a total explosion and that the individual can do very little about it. The sense of doom may today obtain a peculiarly sinister colouring by the

fact that the present form of social existence seems to go down and no new and higher form of social organisation appears on the horizon. The “wave of the future” seems to consummate the very fears that are produced by the conditions of the present. Astrology takes care of this mood by translating it into a pseudo-rational form, thus somehow localising free-floating anxieties in some definite symbolism, but it also gives some vague and diffused comfort by making the senseless appear as though it had some hidden and grandiose sense, while at the same time corroborating that this sense can neither be sought in the realm of the human nor can properly be grasped by humans. The combination of the realistic and the irrational in astrology may ultimately be accounted for by the fact it represents a threat and a remedy in one, just as certain psychotics may start a fire and at the same time prepare for its extinction. JS: Preparing for extinction. Great. I would like to throw that thought right back to Charlotte King who is on the line right now with Eddie Middleton. While you’ve been looking at how people look up to the stars, Professor, Charlotte’s been right here, listening into the earth. Charlotte, can you hear me? JS: I can hear you just fine, Justin. AS: Great. Good. So my next question would be, do you predict any major events coming soon? JS: Well, it’s hard to answer, because I’m in a timeline. I’ve moved the timeline out several days for another, another bigger event again. I haven’t seen the major precursor that I’m watching for yet. Once I see that, I’ll put out a heads-up. AS: Okay. JS: It’s, it’s kind of in a three-day timeline right now, but I am watching for another, that final precursor to show up before I can actually put out a heads-up on it. Like I said before, I’m really feeling Peru, Brazil, and Colombia. That’s the right leg. If it gets

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into the left leg, then you have to watch for Ecuador. I’m watching for Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and the Kermadec Islands. If it’s New Zealand, it could be North or South Island, or even Christchurch. Those are the main areas that I pick up on. Oregon is always vision. You can see just fine, but everything is blurry. Your depth perception is off. Other people are picking up on Chile. So things are still moving around. AS: If you could just hold it there, Charlotte, we just have time to introduce our final guest on Night Search. Professor Bruno Latour, all the way over there in Edinburgh. He has taken time away from preparing for the fourth of his six Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University to be with us tonight. Professor Latour, are you there? AS: Yes, I am here. JS: Great. I understand that you are about to deliver your fourth Gifford Lecture on “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe” today at 2pm on February 25th 2013. AS: That is correct, yes. JS: You’ve been listening to Charlotte all this time, have you not? AS: Yes, I have. Indeed I have. And what I want to say, very briefly, is this: It is our Globe, our ideal idea of the Globe that should be destroyed for any work of art, any aesthetic to emerge. If you agree to hear in the word aesthetic, its old meaning of being able to “perceive” and to be “concerned”, that is, a capacity to render oneself sensitive, a capacity that precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, of art and of politics. JS: Justin here in Pigeon Forks, Tennessee. Just following your words down there in Edinburgh, Professor. Charlotte, when you hear Bruno Latour talking about the capacity to render yourself

sensitive, you are ahead of him, in a sense. After all, you’ve been sensitive since 1979, haven’t you? JS: Yes, I have. I’ll get email from people in Oregon or other places, and all of a sudden they say, Chile must be going on, because I have been angry all day at everything, or my husband and I are fighting, it must be Chile. And it is. It truly is. If you start getting angry, and you don’t know why, and there’s no reason for it, then you have to look for an outside cause, and that’s usually Chile. And, suicides— suicides really, really escalate before Chile. In fact, I had three people that I know personally, two of them good friends, that all knew about Chile, and they committed suicide before the Chile quakes. They had an Operation Lifesaver by our Governor’s taskforce here in Oregon, and they asked me to come in and speak to the group, because I had actually predicted three of the fatalities before they happened, based on my Chile connection. And so they had me come in and talk to them. AS: Amazing… Professor, do you want to come back on that? AS: I really must go to prepare for my fourth Gifford Lecture now. I would just like to emphasise that the capacity to render oneself sensitive precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, of art and of politics. AS: Professor Latour, thank you for joining us. We really do appreciate it. Now, Charlotte, did these suicides just occur with the Chile earthquakes, or is that with earthquakes in general? JS: Chile. I don’t know what it is. I, for sure, I don’t know what the mechanism is that causes it. But I know that it is there, and it’s really easy to see. All you have to do is go back and look at events that have taken place and then go back and look at the reports on the archives on USGS, you know, the United States Geological Survey, and you can see Chile followed every one of those events.

Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines

AS: They had a nine-point quake in Chile, not too long ago, or am I mistaken? JS: Well, Eddie, nine-point-two, that was the biggest quake anybody ever recorded. That was quite a few years back. I think the biggest one, though, was in Alaska, 1964. I think that was the bigger one. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure. We had Chile, Bolivia, and Alaska, and Japan that have all been nine or greater. The Chile quake in 2010, that was 8.8. And I predicted that one. That was the one I predicted to ABC Television before it happened, and it hit four hours later. AS: Wow. Professor Adorno, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been very patient over there in Pacific Palisades? Would you like to respond to anything Charlotte King has been saying? AS: Yes, I would. The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature. AS: Thank you, Professor. Lots to think about there. We appreciate you taking time away from your urgent work on your Ten Theses on Occultism to join us all on Night Search this evening. Charlotte, would you like to come back on anything Professor Adorno has said? JS: Chile, the, the Chile quake in 2010, that was 8.8. And I predicted that one. That was the one I predicted to ABC Television before it happened, and it hit four hours later. That one is on YouTube. They actually put it out there on YouTube, and the interview that they did with me, which was on the news four hours after the quake, within four hours of the quake.

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Abstract Shuffling times is an ill-considered practice inside academia (and perhaps elsewhere too). Manipulating the past for present purposes, reading the future from days gone by, is considered lax at best and devious at worst. Agreed: shuffling times is risky business. Too often, the so-called â&#x20AC;&#x153;learning from the pastâ&#x20AC;? becomes synonymous with accepting both present and future. What has been shall be. What is now, was actually meant to be. Determinism and fatalism are risks that should not be handled carelessly. Yet, shuffling times is what we need to do.

Shuffling Times

Valérie Pihet

Benedikte Zitouni

Valérie Pihet co-founded and directed with Bruno Latour the Programme of Experimentation in Arts and Politics (SPEAP) at Sciences Po, Paris (20102014). Since 2002, Pihet has collaborated with Latour on a number of other projects: she was in charge of coordinating the exhibitions and research projects Iconoclash (ZKM, 2002), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (ZKM, 2005), and created and developed the Sciences Po médialab. She has also worked with numerous artists (including Pierre Huyghe and Armin Linke) as well as with researchers. She is the President of Dingdingdong—Institute of Coproduction of Knowledge on Huntington’s Disease, co-founded with Emilie Hermant in 2012.

Benedikte Zitouni is Lecturer of Sociology at Saint-Louis University, Brussels. She is interested in collective intelligences and has written empirical tales, based on archival work, conveying people’s ingenuity and societal changes at work. Such tales involve urban ecological experiences or communities’ and prisoners’ struggles, but also civil servants’ and technicians’ successes, as well as the tactics involved in peace camps or neighbourhood occupations. In several papers, she tackles the connections between knowledge-making, narratives and empowerment and she has written about situated knowledge, otherworldliness and matters such as remembering and memory-making. Currently she is working on urban agriculture and its connections to forgotten causes and stakes.

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Prelude: an invitation addressed to Benedikte Zitouni My name is Valérie Pihet and I am a historian by training. When PARSE decided to organise an international conference on and about the subject of time, I suggested inviting Benedikte Zitouni, because in our respective practices we are both interested in the question of research, its footprint and spread, and more particularly its repositioning, necessary in a society in deep crisis and disorder. Benedikte Zitouni is a Lecturer at Saint‐Louis University Brussels, teaching courses and seminars in sociology. We are also interested in possible links between the different time frames enabling experimentation with different spaces of intervention. Above all we wish to make sure we take part in our situations. Using the terms and approach I developed with a colleague, Céline Bodart, switching from one place to another wherever the research is being carried out, in contact with what is both familiar or unfamiliar to us, each of us is concerned with questioning our own practice as well as learning to subscribe to the practice of the other.

1. Shuffling Times Benedikte Zitouni

Introduction Shuffling times means lifting the constraints of clear limits between past, present and future. It means crafting present times by mixing those pasts, presents and futures. It means handling times with eyes riveted on present purposes and possibilities. It means letting a plural and potential “now” take over and substitute itself to the linear and irreversible past-present-future thinking and story-telling we’re

used to. That, in fact, is also the premise or starting point common of the leads I’m about to present: the notion that linear and irreversible past-present-future thinking, storytelling, is to be avoided at all costs. Linear past-present-futures are problematic for they lock up present potential in deterministic and fatalist patterning. Even the so-called “learning from the past”, which is a common practice in academia and which might look like it shuffles times and has its eyes riveted on present purposes, too often becomes synonymous with accepting both present and future. What has been shall be. What is now, was actually meant to be. In other words, shuffling times is not just about bringing past and future in contact with present times—which I think is even a default position in academia—but it means lifting the limits and the linearity inherent to our usual ways of thinking about time. I’ll describe three leads. The first lead is called “brewing times” and is based on those same terms used by Bruno Latour and Michel Serres and is illustrated with a tiny and tentative example of Leopold II or Belgian colonial memory-making. The second one is called “monumental times” and is based on writings by Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, which I’ll shortly illustrate by evoking tales of revolts. The third one is called “thick present”, drawing on the work of Donna Haraway and Deborah Bird Rose, and will be the starting point of the discussion as Valérie and I relate “thick presents” to the ways in which both of us have become fascinated with archives.

Lead 1: Brewed Times In We Have Never Been Modern, the re-conception of time and temporality plays an important role. Not because of some debate on the critical prefixes added to modernism (pre-, post-, anti-, non-, a-modernism) but because Bruno Latour felt he had to adopt new temporalities in order to host and make space

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for the material objects, technologies and networks he cares for. Let me rehearse the argument.1 The NonModerns—such as we are, unknowingly perhaps were, and should learn to become again—are those who can simultaneously consider, on the one hand, the Modern Constitution, i.e. the set of claims that separate non-human nature and human society, pure categories and hybrid entities, religion and metaphysics, i.e. our rational and usual beliefs, while on the other hand considering the multiplication of hybrids, natural-social mixes, that are actually there but that we deny any degree of real existence and agency because we believe in our Constitution. If we are yet again to become Non-Moderns, we need to leave aside that constitution—incidentally, post- and anti-modernists fail to do so as they continue to address the constitution, either in disillusioned or critical ways—and we need to open up space and welcome the hybrids into our living, thinking and storytelling. Latour calls that space the Middle Kingdom. He calls its people, following Michel Serres, quasi-objects. Neither entirely objects nor entirely subjects, quasi-objects are active agents of mediation and networking. They are the ones that Latour cares for. In the first place, he’s given them a kingdom. He then gives them an ontology or way of life: hybridity is the name of the game, in which the tags “object” and “subject” are but ephemeral passing points. Last but not least, he gives them a temporality. For if you consider these quasi-objects and compose with them, you’ll have to admit that they have their own histories, their own time-making, their own temporality.

Quasi-objects, if taken seriously, do not fit into the strict ordering of humanist living for whom the past is gone, the present is transient and the future’s not yet there. Instead, quasi-objects gather and brew epochs. They span and multiply time-lapses. To put it differently, any facet of our existence, if looked at through the lens of the quasi-objects, necessarily mixes several pasts, presents and futures and cannot be categorised into the “gone”, “transient” or “not yet there”. I quote Latour: I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirtyfive years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert “of contrasts” because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousands of years. As Péguy’s Clio said, and as Michel Serres repeats, we are exchangers and brewers of time (Serres and Latour 1992). It is this exchange that defines us, not the calendar of the flow that the moderns had constructed for us.2 From the point of view of modern times, any situation is unorthodox. The quasiobjects exceed the fixed boundaries of past-present-future. Not only do they differ in age, they are gestures from different times, i.e. they also involve their own particular time spans of usage and rhythms. They are better accounted

1. The argument is based on the following parts of Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern. La Découverte / Poche, new edition in 1997: end of Chapter 2, p. 70; Chapter 3, particularly p. 95 and pp. 101-108. 2. Ibid., p. 75.

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3. Hochschil, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1998. p. 295. 4. Ibid., p. 296. 5. See the following link: http://www.7sur7.be/7s7/ fr/1502/Belgique/article/ detail/410285/2008/09/09/ La-statue-de-Leopold-IIvoit-rouge.dhtml (Accessed November 2015.) 6. Latour, op. cit., p. 90. 7. Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard. 1979. No. 269 “Vivre autrement le temps”, No. 270 “Inutile de se soulever”. 8. Ibid., pp. 793-794.

for, not by a linear time frame but by a spiralling one. Each new cycle expands experiences. It takes up and leaves aside some ingredients of the other cycles. Lost ingredients can at any time be taken up again. Selected ones can at any time fall into oblivion. In other words, as Latour stated very clearly, we must stop thinking that time makes the triage. Rather, the triage makes time. Or, we make the triage and thereby define our times. The question remains: why should we want to change our times? For one, because spiralling time allows us to involve ourselves, with our own material temporalities (such as genes and ideas and others) into and with the quasiobjects’ own temporalities, heading for potentially more interesting hybrid assemblages. But also, more simply perhaps, call it my conviction or my commitment, because the past is with us. It is present. It is not gone. It is there, but perhaps in another key or in another mode of existence.

By way of illustration, I want to present a short and tentative take on Belgian postcolonial memory-making. This picture was taken in a park that looks over Brussels, triumphantly, in an alley that points to the Palace of Justice and the Royal Palace. The man hidden by roses—I think anyone in Brussels, in Belgium, would recognise him—is Leopold II, the King who has “given us” Congo and who is known for the terror of his reign. Yet there is denial. For some, for many, Leopold II is an exemplary King. And I wonder: what if we brewed times? What if unveiling the deeds is simply not enough? What if we lifted the clear limits between past, present and future and resuscitated Leopold II? Bringing him here, which in fact, he is. The lives of the dead are reaching into the very fabric of our city. It is something I’ve become convinced of. The lives of the dead are reaching. They are there, in the material fabric. So then, if we’d write a brewing or spiralling tale, what could we, would we, write? I gave it a try: The shadows of the Empire and its blood rubber King still haunt us today. “Now sometimes in my sleep I think I am the poor devil and half a hundred black fiends are dancing about me. I wake up with a great start and I find myself covered in a cold sweat.” (letter from a manager of a rubber-collecting post in the Kasai region, 1896-1901)3 “Often they find, in the folds of his pocket/ With gold rings and crumpled satin/ Two children’s feet cruelly cut off.” (poem written during World War I, about Germans mutilating Belgian babies as if to revenge what had happened in Congo some years before)4

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“We’re pouring red and blood paint on the King’s statue today in the name of the millions of victims of the colonial policy run by this imperialist, racist and stupid despot. The nice business-as-usual perpetuation of his memory is no longer.” (activists 2008)5 Beard ringed with roses. Beard spattered with paint. A manager’s cold sweat. A rumour about cut off feet, echoing a fact about cut off hands... It is my impression that remembrance and memory-making could use some past-future-present spiralling rather than linear and single-arrowed time-tracing. It is a way to make the haunting present, physically, materially, discursively, affectively. As Latour writes: Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as being: such are the quasiobjects that the moderns have caused to proliferate. As such it behoves us to pursue them, while we simply become once more what we never have ceased to be: amoderns [non modernes].6

Lead 2: Monumental times According to Michel Foucault, any account he writes must be eventful. Singular and out-of-theordinary deeds should not be turned into mere components of the passage of time. Singular and out-of-the-ordinary deeds should not become mere episodes in the evolution of mankind. Singular and out-of-the-ordinary deeds should not be turned into a proof of futility as they are set against the walls of society’s structural forces. Foucault states this clearly in two articles written for the main press, in May 1979. One on the subject of time; the other on the subject of uprisings [soulèvement].7 Foucault states that one of the most powerful actions for a philosopher, for anyone actually, is to break the thread and course of time; to make one available for the events of time; to vibrate for and at each one of these events, be they close by or far off, huge or small. The radical deed is to pay attention to all that

which escapes the weight of structural history: the breaking, the ripping, the interrupting of times by events that, in religious terms, would be likened to a collective state of grace and which, in political terms, can simply be called uprisings. Foucault defends uprisings against the notion that the passage of time will only be interrupted, profoundly shaken and structurally changed, by an overall revolution. All or nothing. In order not to minimise singular and out-of-the ordinary deeds, Foucault then does away with the notion of revolution and focuses on uprisings instead. Uprisings are of all kinds, he says. They can surge from an entire people or they can be limited to a single cry of protest. They can happen everywhere and well outside the usual confines of the so-called political arena. They are the deeds that interrupt “business as usual”. We must respect them, i.e. not trivialise them, for they make history: I don’t agree with those who say: “It’s useless to revolt for it will always be the same.” One doesn’t wave a finger at those who risk their lives against authority and power. Should one revolt or not? Let’s leave that question open. One revolts, that is a fact; and through that revolt subjectivity (not of great men but of anyone) introduces itself into history and gives it its breath. A delinquent risks his life opposing abusive sanctions; a madman no longer accepts to be locked up; a people refuses an oppressive regime. That doesn’t clear the delinquent’s name; nor does it cure the madman; nor does it insure a better world for the people. I do not mean to say we have to agree with them and join them. Nor do we have to find their voices superior to all others. It suffices for them to exist and to stubbornly resist all silencing, for us to pay attention, for us to try and understand what they’re saying. Is this a moral question? Perhaps. A reality question, certainly. All the disenchantments of the world won’t change this: these voices turn human times into something else than an evolution; they turn them into “ history”.8

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Reading Foucault on his commitment to unyielding voices, brings to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. For instance, when Nietzsche writes: And if you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend “Herr So-and-So and his age”, but those upon whose title-page there would stand “a fighter against his age”.9 Or: [History] puts itself in the pillory by exalting precisely these men as the real historical natures who bothered little with the “thus it is” so as to follow “thus it shall be”.10 Or: [about so-called “ failures” of the few:] That the many are alive and those few live no longer is nothing but a brute truth, that is to say an incorrigible stupidity, a blunt “thus it is” in opposition to morality’s “it ought not to be thus”. Yes, in opposition to morality! [...] In every case it becomes a virtue through rising against that blind power of the factual and tyranny of the actual.11 For Nietzsche, historical writings can take many forms, one of which is the monumental. Monumental history-writing is geared towards action. It turns improbable episodes of the past into monuments, into greatness, into sheer eventfulness, in order to shore up the present. Echoing links are established between the actions, the deeds, the improbable facts of past, present and future. But this only makes sense, Nietzsche hastens to add, if history is mobilised for action. “Greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again”.12 In other words, we’re betting on repetition. We’re writing echoing times. Other types of history-writing imply other conditions: what Nietzsche calls “antiquarian”

history implies reverence, the love of details past; what he calls “critical” history implies there being a sense of burden, the need to free oneself from the yoke of the present. These other types of histories absolutely make sense and they are valuable as long as we acknowledge the need, the desire, they address. To put it concisely, knowledge, writing, never goes without passion. The monumental history-writing’s passion is that of action and that which Nietzsche seems to favour the most, that which Foucault seems to have taken over in order to claim the importance of uprisings. By way of illustration, I’d like to evoke the power of archival books, i.e. books which bring to us, make present, here and now, material traces of so-called “past” struggles. It seems to me these books are powerful because they do not analyse, categorise and label the struggles, but, as Foucault observes, they try and understand what these struggles are saying. In other words, these books present enigmas, matter for thinking, deeds for echoing and reinventing over and over again greatness or defiance. Books such as Philippe Artières’ Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte 1970-1972.13 This book tells the story of the prisoners and their allies who put forth existential and political claims at the beginning of the 1970s. In it you will find pamphlets, letters, claims, public announcements, testimonies and questionnaires set up by the alliance from within and without the prison walls. If there is any analysis, it is by way of recounting, storytelling and description. Another book: Darrel Enck-Wanzer’s The Young Lords: A Reader.14 The Young Lords are a Latino group inspired by the Black Panthers who set up community building in Chicago, New York and other cities of the US. By way of introduction, the editor describes what he feels to be the sense of importance carried by the Young Lords, and two Young Lord activists reflect upon their past experience in the 1970s. Then come the traces: articles of the Young Lords’ journals, posters, interviews, pamphlets, claims. All written in the present tense.

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The third book dates from the 1980s and will soon be translated and published by Cambourakis Editions in France: Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk’s Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions from the Women’s Peace Movement.15 Greenham Common is the name of a decennia-long occupation of a military base in England, by women protesting against nuclear, capitalist and other destructive ways. The book assembles fragments taken from the peace encampment’s logbooks. It was literally written on the camp site, during the protest. All these books are hard to trivialise. When you leaf through them, you cannot but wonder: who is to say what time these words and experiences belong to? Why wouldn’t they be part of our present?

Lead 3: Thick present I define the “thick present” following Donna Haraway. Haraway borrows that definition from Deborah Bird Rose who borrows it from the Yarralin, a people living in North Australia.16 According to them, according to her, the present unfolds along the marrow of the events people tell one another; it unfolds along the plots and stories one still recalls with a minimum of detail; it involves events of which the actors and agents still bear a name; it gathers up episodes that are still connected and embodied by the situations and concrete spaces we inhabit, here and now. So the present can be poor or rich, bare or flourishing, deserted or crowded, depending on the stories we tell. In any case, such a present must continuously be maintained by retaking these stories and relaying the experiences. Not any story, not any experience,

but those we tell, those that make us wonder, very often because they defy the general tendencies of “business as usual”. Without continuous re-enactment of these stories and experience, no thickness nor flourishing can prevail. According to the Yarralin, Deborah Bird Rose, Donna Haraway, a present without stories becomes an evanescent present, one that gives nothing to hold onto nor care for. A bare present offers no resistance. Or, stated inversely, everything we’ve come to care for through the stories we tell belongs to the thick present. The stories of devices, agencies and assemblages, which are carried forth and embodied by the very situation we live in, define the thick present. Every cell of our bodies, as Haraway would have it, any ingredient of our daily lives and deaths and their infinite ramifications into calendar pasts, presents and futures, are part of the thick present. And they will be part of it for as long as their stories are told. Thus, the point of entry and of exit, into and out of the thick present, is not a matter of years but rather one of dramatic storytelling. How to make things present, how to trigger in and through the storytelling, is the key question for those storytellers who want to thicken our present and multiply its possibilities and potentialities.

2. How Dingdingdong shuffle(s) times Valérie Pihet The lines of thinking about time brewing, suggested by Benedikte Zitouni, as lures for thinking/narrating,

9. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life”. In Untimely Meditation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1997. p. 95. 10. Ibid., p. 106. 11. Ibid., p. 106. 12. Ibid., p. 69. 13. Artières, Philippe (ed.). Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte 1970-1972. Saint-Germainla-Blanche-Herbe: IMEC— Institut de Mémoire de l’Edition Contemporaine. 2003. 14. Enck-Wanzer, Darrel (ed.). The Young Lords: A Reader. New York, NY: New York University Press. 2010. 15. Cook, Alice and Kirk, Gwyn (eds.). Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions from the Women’s Peace Movement. London: Pluto Press. 1983. 16. Bird Rose, Deborah. Dingo Makes us Human. Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992; Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonization. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press. 2004; Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. University of Virginia Press. 2011. For Donna Haraway’s use of Deborah Bird Rose’s work, see, for instance: Haraway, Donna. Staying in Trouble: Becoming-with the Creatures of Empire. San Francisco: CCA – California College of the Arts. 2009. 20 October https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3F0XdXf VDXw (Accessed 2016-07-29.)

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lead me to share with you the story of a collective that I co-founded with Alice Rivières and about fifteen other people.17 This is the Collectif Dingdingdong, otherwise known as the Institut de co‐ production de savoir sur la maladie de Huntington (Institute of Coproduction of Knowledge about Huntington’s disease). I knew Alice even before she took a test indicating she had a so-called neuro‐degenerative disease, Huntington’s. The doctors informed her straight away that it was going to be terrible, then swiftly turned to the two close friends with her to let them know that things would be truly dreadful for them as well. This announcement made Alice very angry, not because, contrary to what one might think, she had been told she would develop Huntington’s disease, but because the doctors on that day assigned to her a pre-determined, even hopeless, future. Huntington’s, in its starkest medical definition, is a rare, incurable genetic disease, causing cognitive, motor and psychiatric degeneration, gradually bringing on progressive loss of autonomy and death. Since 1993, when the genetic anomaly in question was identified, a test has existed enabling people with one parent affected to find out whether they too are carriers of this disease. Technically, nothing could be simpler: all it requires is a blood test to see whether you carry the bad gene. Yet ethically, psychologically, existentially, nothing could be more complicated. The genetic specificity of the disease is such that if you carry the gene you are certain to develop Huntington’s one day, though neither when (between the ages of 35 and 55 according to the statistics), nor how, can be predicted since its expression is very different and variable. The “neither when nor how” is the essence of the problem. Huntington’s is a disease whose progression is not straightforward. Today we are starting to describe it as a neuro-evolutive rather than a neuro-degenerative disease, which is more accurate. After all, life itself is to a certain extent neuro-degenerative. But that said, the one thing we cannot predict with any certainty

at all is how the person will experience their disease, nor how they will be able to cope with it. Here we have a situation where you are informed of a looming disaster, although nothing much more can be said or done about it. But where is the sense in seeing a person’s catastrophic future and letting them know in this way? We often think that looking ahead means imagining a probable future, but this can lead to using words, pronouncements, even actions whose effects may be dangerous, such as envisaging and transmitting the idea of the worst that could possibly happen when telling someone they have a disease such as Huntington’s. The news then takes on the form of a terrifying prediction, immediately slamming the door on all “possibles” and propelling you into a terrifying enigma, far beyond the routine medical consultation which triggered the whole thing. I believe, as Benedikte Zitouni so rightly emphasises, that this has to do with our linear way of envisaging time which determines and encloses present time. Linear time literally immobilises us, preventing us from seeking out the “possibles” necessarily contained in a situation. To revert to Deleuze, based on the work of Katrin Solhdju, a problem without a solution is a badly formulated problem. There is always something to be done when the problem is that of life.18 Alice wrote a text very soon after taking the test, in a moment of rage, but at the time she had not yet discovered how to channel it. This became the Manifesto of Dingdingdong.19 Alice’s expression of anger is an act of resistance against viewing the disease simply as a disaster-in-waiting, turning it instead into an invitation to reflect, or rather to “develop thought” so as to build a world in which as of now the sick and their entourage can live. The day we decided to set up Dingdingdong, we boldly assumed that behind Alice’s story was something much larger, a challenge of a political nature. So we decided to get involved in the issue of knowledge established on the back of these experiences, to force a slowdown when medical definitions move too fast,

Valérie Pihet and Benedikte Zitouni

are too crude, or flatten the mystery of the enigmas of “what is already known”. We understand that medicine is already caught up in its own time frame and in the constraints tied to its own practices, but in so doing it runs the risk of reducing the experience of the people affected, which might take years to unfold, Huntington’s being all familial, so much so that we can learn nothing more from it. This creates a sometimes enormous gap between a medical definition and the experience thereof, which is violent for the people concerned, as well as for the doctors, and all too often leads to disastrous situations. We started from the principle that the universe we are calling Huntingtonian or Huntingtonland was as mysterious as an unknown planet and that we needed to set off to explore it, to transform our puzzlement into true enigmas, that is to say into questions giving rise to many hypotheses none of which could claim dominance, and which commit us to invent possible ways of coping with Huntington’s. No question of replacing the medical definition with a more subjective one, but rather of enabling several versions of Huntington’s to coexist. Our mission is to nurture the multiple experiences of the disease, both from the space of those people affected (patients, carriers, entourage), as well as from that of the professionals, and in so doing to construct an as yet unrecognised form of knowledge, which our interlocutors, particularly the doctors, could make alliances with. For patients (users in the broadest sense), all too often their experience is associated with their day-to-day existence, generally considered the province of the psy-

chologists. This daily existence throws the patients back upon their emotions and feelings. It is as if on the one hand patients are reduced to their emotional experiences, and on the other, the professionals to their scientific knowledge. At Dingdingdong, we are working on the idea of experiential knowledge. We are not the only ones using this term, but we place it in a very specific take on experience, that used by the pragmatist philosophers. They believe that an experience cannot be reduced to the mere fact of being affected or of feeling something. An experience is complete only when the fact of being affected commits us to a resulting action—of whatever kind—such as to transform the very conditions of the experience. This being so, discussing experiential knowledge means taking very seriously everything the users do every day to tame the disease. It means that they do not merely feel or have things done to them but that they employ strategies, gestures, attitudes enabling them to live with the disease and that this is true knowledge. Our task is precisely to find a way of encountering this knowledge, which, since it is still invisible, cannot be used; to collect this knowledge and enable it to be shared so that it can truly change the ways we describe the disease and therefore experience it. This is an extremely painstaking task since for the experience to truly engage with all those concerned, each word, each action, each thing, each way of doing things has its own importance. This fragile ensemble must constantly be readjusted because if only one element shifts this is enough to alter the whole course of the experience. In Dingdingdong, what we are interested

17. See Debaise, Dider. L’appât des possibles. Reprise de Whitehead. Paris: Les presses du réel. 2015. 18. Solhdju, Katrin. L’épreuve du savoir. Propositions pour une écologie du diagnostic. Paris: Editions Dingdongdong. Paris. 2015 19. Manifesto of Dingdingdong, preceded by “De la chorée” by Georges Huntington. Trans.Vincent Bergerat. Paris: Editions Dingdingdong. 2013.

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in doing is putting together and nurturing the right environment in the ecological and ecosystemic, even cosmogonic sense of the term, to follow Vinciane Despret, a founding member of Dingdingdong.20 This is a “milieu” that will allow the experience to fully unfold and extend in other possibles even outside Huntington’s and, most importantly, to be capable of adjustment. Therefore, rather than considering that the catastrophe lies somewhere in the future, we at Dingdingdong prefer to consider that disaster is already here and we have to act from within it. It is already with us and already the players are taking action by using a great deal of savoir-faire in their daily lives. This is the take proposed by Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and others as concerns the present ecological crisis. Huntington’s becomes an interesting situation in which to learn to reflect upon the catastrophe from within. Dingdingdong is the sound of alarm bells ringing, urging people to gather together but above all sounding a note of warning, announcing time out, a break from “business as usual”, in the words of Zitouni, following Foucault and Nietzsche. Today, faced with strong feelings of powerlessness and widespread discouragement, the hardest, most complicated political task is to avoid being overwhelmed by the irreversible flow of time, by the “that’s just the way it is, hard luck” attitude, in the words of Thierry Drumm, who is interested in William James’s pragmatist philosophy.21 When Dingdingdong was being set up, I got my students to read the book of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, which calls on us to fundamentally rethink what it means to be political, to give back its meaning to this adjective all too quickly attached to all kinds of activity. Dewey proposes reviewing the place and role of the political through a new reading of “public” in its double meaning where, for him, there is no omnipotent public supposed to have an enlightened opinion on everything on the one hand,

and on the other, where the category public/private does not correspond to the usual distinction of public good versus individual good. For him politics is not only a sphere, a profession, an occupation, it is above all a certain type of concern about “causes”, “problems”, each of which requires a particular form of public.22 The public in the singular does not exist, in the sense of a sovereign people represented by its elected officials, and embodied by the State. On the contrary, a public must be made to emerge for each “cause” or “problem”. So therefore there is not one single, but multiple, publics concerned by specific problems and transformed by them appearing and disappearing, depending on their state of resolution. The publics must be made and unmade, reinvented each time. If indeed there is a “crisis of the Public” then it is in Dewey’s sense, the spontaneous emergence of publics. As Joëlle Zask, in her preface to the translation of Dewey’s book, reminds us, he always worked as “a philosopher, teacher and militant to rebuild an effective public more fundamentally concerned with defining its own interests and making them political rather than controlling those who govern us.”23 Seen from this angle it appears possible, even essential, to think and create a setting to allow the emergence of publics capable of acting, proposing, objecting, enabling a problem to come into being. Getting a problem right goes hand in hand with the prospect of solving it as well as with the emergence of a public. These three dimensions must interact, constituting the enquiry, still in Dewey’s sense. This requires time, a setting and tools to find ways and means of going about it. A public is never given. Anger, such as that felt by Alice after her experience of the test protocol, if you are willing to transform it, can be a very good driver for seeking a possible public. This is what we decided to do. Alice was no longer alone, nor was I, we were two, and we needed to set up a team. We therefore went to seek out people with whom we wished to work to invent ways of dealing with Huntington’s. In so doing we were assuming that practical specialists would be interested, from their position,

Valérie Pihet and Benedikte Zitouni

in the problem we then formulated. We also assumed that you didn’t necessarily need to be affected by Huntington’s to be interested. Being concerned means being put to work by the way the problem, as posed, also questions the practice in which we are engaged, whether or not as professionals. We set up a multidisciplinary Franco-Belgian team consisting of researchers in human sciences (philosophy, history of sciences, psychology), artists (dance and choreography, literature, the plastic arts, videos and video games) and one specialist physician (neurology). We still needed to discover how we wanted to work. We decided to create an association under the 1901 French law, but several people in the collective, including Fabrizio Terranova and Sophie Toporkoff, immediately pushed us to go further and to dream up an institute of co-production of knowledge even before we could make it a reality. They were right because the fact of dreaming it up helped make it become real. Pragmatist thinking is the foundation of Dingdingdong and this is why we devoted a whole department to it. It would be absurd to hope to sum up in a few lines the multiple contributions of this approach, especially since we have not finished exploring it. But we can say that it is especially important to us because it forces us, through William James and John Dewey, to think and create bearing in mind the effects we wish to bring about in real life or in a situation in which we are of necessity stakeholders, rather than merely along the lines of what our practices alone would commit us to doing. We borrow from James a very powerful expression which gave him the title of one of his books, The Will to Believe.24 According

to him a fact can only occur, and thus become true, if preceded by a deeply held belief in it before its arrival. Further, he believes that it is extremely important to cultivate this belief, in other words this confidence, to nurture it, to maintain it, since it is a contributory factor to the transformation into the real which we desire to bring about. As we have already seen, Dingdingdong arose from the faith we had in its success, which for us meant that we had begun to noticeably change the situation in France through our work. Our work in Dingdongdong helped us build confidence, and especially the confidence to “allow ourselves” to speak out, to be heard, to act and also to equip ourselves for this, starting with proposing a multiplicity of possible versions of the disease. When we start work, we always begin by thinking what transformation, what difference it is we wish to bring about and then we try to make use of the means we believe are relevant for this to happen. Obviously this approach goes hand-in-hand with the risk of making mistakes and of missing our target. This is par for the course for any form of experimentation, and particularly when the purpose of the experiment is to bring about true change. The Department of Speculative Narration starts from exactly the same basis and aims at experimenting with the effects and power of storytelling, seen not as an escape into the imaginary, but as opting for possibles versus probables, to use the terms of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, who is also the godmother of Dingdingdong. The term comes from Donna Haraway but is tweaked by a large number of members of our collective. Fabrizio Terranova went so far

20. Despret, Vinciane. Au bonheur des morts. Paris: La Découverte. 2015. 21. Intervention in the Seminar “Pratiques de soin et collectifs”, 31 March 2015, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris. 22. Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. 1927. 23. Dewey, John. Le public et ses problèmes (1927). Trans. Joëlle Zask. Paris: Gallimard. 2003. p. 17. 24. James, William. “The Will to Believe”. The New World. Vol. 5. 1896. pp. 327-347.

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as to create a Masters in Speculative Narration in the École de Recherche Graphique de Bruxelles. This methodology of creation is anchored in the reality of experiences and situations, aiming at detaching itself slightly from the real in order to upset it. A concept, an idea or a work cannot be a priori evaluated away from concrete situations. On the contrary, their value depends uniquely on their effects, that is to say their capacity to intervene transformatively in the reality concerned. Linking the terms of speculation and narration is at one and the same time examining and detecting the possibles necessarily contained in a situation or problem, and finding a way of making stories from them which can contribute to bringing the possibles into being. This is feasible since they will have enabled us to believe in them sufficiently for us to commit to making them reality, as advocated by the philosopher William James. We were convinced of the power of believing in our dream from the outset since we had conjured up an Institute of Coproduction of Knowledge around Huntington’s disease even before the Institute effectively came into existence and before our work had gradually conferred reality upon it. It also appeared urgent to invent a story to express the violence of an action like the test predicting genetic status, so as to begin the task of taming the disease. On the basis of interviews carried out with users, we are working with Fabrizio Terranova to make a series of video capsules, featuring the performer Olivier Marboeuf, alias Dr. Marboeuf. This series stages scenes with a medical doctor who gradually transforms a situation where terrible news about an incurable disease turns into a situation which creates possibles, in other words, where everything is open. In the first capsule, Dr. Marboeuf reports on a clinical situation linked to the pre-symptomatic test which made a deep impression on him. After he had given a negative result to a young woman, she and her sister emphatically objected, saying, “We’ll be back when you’re able to admit what you don’t

know.” For him, this retort gradually turned into a constructive provocation, a “pro-vocation” which led to the establishment an experimental research unit to explore all aspects of Huntington’s in close collaboration with those affected. The second capsule takes up the story a good year later. Dr. Marboeuf reads and comments on a letter he had received from a well-known French clairvoyant, Maud Kristen, about announcing bad news. The words of the clairvoyant meant so much to him that he considered experimenting in alternative ways of telling a patient they have HD. These videos are posted on YouTube and presented in several contexts, including medical congresses.25 Whether the effects are visible or not, are great or small, we would like to believe, as William James urges us to do, that they will gradually bring about a transformation from a closed situation into one which demands we cope with it. In Dingdingdong we like to develop things with time because what matters are the effects of what we are producing. These effects must almost immediately be altered as we factor them in so the experiment can continue. To follow (“pour‐suivre”, “pur-sue”), the proposition of Didier Debaise, the concept of experience is not restricted to the viewpoint of the person who had the experience but extends to every thing/situation/moment/activity/ event, which then becomes the subject of the experience.26 That being the case, if even only one element shifts, the whole course of the experience will be altered and it is the continuum of the experience which is vital. As the clairvoyant Maud Kristen said in her long letter to Dr. Marboeuf, “only movement is eternal”. To follow that route it is important to take account of every single thing—I insist, anything and everything—involved in the experiences, including the time frames required. Huntington’s exists in multiple time frames: the genetic evolution of mankind, family ancestry (hereditary disease), a life. Huntington’s is a disease in movement. Dingdingdong is keen to nurture the multiple experiences of the disease from its multiple perspectives: the patients, their nearest and dearest,

Valérie Pihet and Benedikte Zitouni

the professionals, but also that of the gene responsible, the mice working with scientists in laboratories etc., and to create stories to link them all. To do this we need the specific inventiveness of each one of us. We work with artists since they are exploring the experiences in Huntingtonland just like other researchers. All Dingdingdong’s activities resonate with and nourish one another. We are very conscious of the way in which we constitute a collective. If we might want to slow down when medical definitions go too fast, we also want to slow down when our ways of setting about things seem too obvious. Establishing a collective demands a great deal of tact and caution, which must always be present. Working in enjoyable conditions in a co-production of knowledge means constantly learning to question what it is that gets us working together without necessarily being at the same place and time. Working together also means getting each person interested from their own practice in what the situation requires. We do not spend much time discussing our process but we commit to the work, that is to staying with what we are working on as long as the situation requires it, regardless of where the problem lies and who formulates it. Dingdingdong viewed itself as an institution from the very beginning, piecing together fragile knowledge and using alternative research methods, in contrast to established knowledge usually covered by the term “institution”. What is most important to us is to produce relevant knowledge, effective for its users and in coping with HD, while at the same time honing our methods in the HD school (or rather anti-school). It is not first and

foremost our practices or methods we are committed to, but rather the problem which made the institute necessary: how to cope with Huntington’s? When we work on this project we are not “only” researchers, we are also involved in some way or other. We do not seek to remain neutral, to produce evidence, to avoid methodological bias at all costs. We do commit ourselves to reporting very strictly the way in which our attachments, our hesitations, our uncertainties, mirroring those of our interlocutors, may contribute to co-producing knowledge with them. In other words, we are not seeking to make science but to make knowledge. Situated knowledge, knowledge allowing a plural, potential present, knowledge anchored in the present yet a present put together with ingredients from the past, present and future.

25. See https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=S1WqbRB9a6Q and https://www. youtube.com/ watch?v=S1WqbRB9a6Q (Accessed 2016-07-15.) 26. Debaise, Didier, L’invention d’un univers pluraliste, colloquium “Au tournant de l’expérience”, Cité de l’architecture et du Patrimoine de Paris, 2016, p. 2.

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Abstract Flat Time House Institute (FTHo) was initiated in 2008 in the house that John Latham (1921-2006) occupied until his death, the site of his decade-long experiment with the idea of Flat Time. FTHo, led by curator Claire Louise Staunton, commissions ongoing artistic projects that come out of the Artists Placement Group tradition (itself an interesting experiment in the temporality of the commission and the artist as an “incidental person”), hosts an archive, artists’ residencies and an alternative education programme run by artist and educator John Hill. For the 2015 PARSE conference on Time, FTHo presented a screening programme, pairing moving image works from contemporary artists with films by John Latham, using his Time-Base Theory as a curatorial device. The selected works perform the various bands of Latham’s time-based spectrum—from Least Event (quantum) via the frequency of human perception, to human reproduction, to cosmos. The article and image selection documents the screening and the ideas behind it.

Flat Time House— Curating the Time-Base

John Hill

Claire Louise Staunton

John Hill is an artist, organiser and educator and was Education Officer at Flat Time House 2009–2015 and a founding member of the London-based collective LuckyPDF. His current practice explores network technologies and contemporary cultural platforms. He is also a Graduate Researcher at Liverpool John Moores University, contributing to the Uses of Art group, a partner of L’Internationale.

Claire Louise Staunton was Director/Curator at Flat Time House and at Inheritance Projects (London). In 2015 she took up the position of Research Curator at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, where she leads public programmes and research activities on new town urban planning, communities and art in partnership with the Open University. She is a PhD research candidate in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art.

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(FTHo) was initiated in 2008 in the house that John Latham (1921-2006) occupied until his death, the site of a decade-long experiment with the idea of Flat Time. A central figure in the London underground of the 1960s and 1970s, Latham was a founding member of the Artist Placement Group (APG), an artist-led programme of experimental placements within major corporations and institutions, which focused not on the art object but rather on the time-based process of art making as a social practice of decision taking. FTHo (led by curator Claire Louise Staunton from 2012 to 2016) commissioned artistic projects that often come out of the APG tradition— dealing directly or indirectly with Latham’s theories of time— hosts an archive, artists’ residencies and an alternative education programme initiated by artist and educator John Hill. FTHo announced that it would be closing its premises in August 2016 and continuing as a nomadic curatorial project led by Gareth Bell-Jones. lat Time House Institute

For the 2015 PARSE conference on Time, FTHo presented a screening of films, which was an experiment in curating time, employing Latham’s time-base theory as a curatorial device. FTHo the house and the institute, even before Latham’s passing, has been a testing ground for theories of time, and art making’s potential to embody and illustrate cosmological phenomena. For Latham, the universe was structured by repetitious and networked events in multi-dimensional time, out of which objects and space emerge. The “least event” was for him a discharge of potential and the subtlest and shortest moment out of which all other events are made. The “least event” represented creation from a lost original event and through its insistent repetition of varying lengths, all phenomena come into being. In this universe of events, the event is a unit of measurement, and the “time-base spectrum” is a scale along which all events—physical, cultural, or psychological—can be measured and related to one another (this is what Latham meant as “flat time”). Art and physics are infinitely inter-relatable. Importantly for Latham, the “incidental person”, often an artist, is an observer who can both enact events and be sensitive to them beyond anthropocentric perceptions of passing time. The curatorial, understood as an event in knowledge, and the act of curating as a practice in which events are staged, is a discipline acutely attuned to temporality. The screening at

Claire Louise Staunton and John Hill

the PARSE conference was a challenge for us to reconsider filmic time and the event of the frame in relation to Latham’s theories. Using two screens, our filmic composition set up a dialogic relationship between John Latham’s 1971 film ERTH (the result of a commission, negotiated by APG, from the UK National Coal Board) and a series of selected works. This screening performed the various bands of Latham’s “time-based spectrum”—from “least event” to the frequency of human perception, to human reproduction, to cosmos. It was our aim to overlay various concurrent time-bases in order for the viewer/ observer to move beyond the intelligible content of the frames and become sensitive to complex events, or to perceive the different time scales represented and, in some cases, performed through the artworks.

Nicholas Mangan, “A World Undone”, 2012, HD video, silent, 12 min.

Erth and Parallel Screenings: A Description of the Works and their Juxtaposition Zircon is a 4,400-million-year-old crystalline mineral, not much younger than the Earth itself, formed in its earliest crust and still found in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. In Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012), zircon fragments, ground to dust, are captured in airborne constellations that invoke a time both before the Earth’s formation and beyond its possible lifespan, reaching beyond our limits of perception. John Latham’s ERTH (1971) begins at a scale of “one thousand million years”, with the image of a One Second Drawing (Least Event), a splattered spray paint image that for Latham linked the moment of artistic making to the “whole event” of its context. Latham’s constellation-like spray drawings, which he started making in 1954, created an infinitely complex image from the smallest gesture, a picture of molecular, biological or cosmological structure within the quantum of a mark. This artistic act enabled him to think in new ways across the different scales, flattening the plane of time where different events could be related. In Latham’s time-base theory an event’s position on the “time-base spectrum” is not determined by its duration, but by its central period of repetition. Band P, 10 9 seconds, or roughly 30 years, marks the centre of a human reproductive

Keren Cytter, “Der Spiegel”, 2007, video, 4 min. 56 sec.

Stuart Croft, “Drive In”, 2007, 16mm transferred to video, 7 min. 25 sec. © Stuart Croft Foundation.

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generation. In reality, however, all events are complex patterns of overlapping and connected frequencies. Keren Cytter’s Der Spiegel (2007) presents a loop of human sexual anxiety. The tension caused by conflicting frequencies of human life—“a man with 50 years of experience and a 16-year-old soul”—can be mapped onto time-base theory’s separation of intuitive, rational and instinctive motivations, each with their own diminishing period along the time-base. These embedded loops appear as narrative in the mise en abyme of Stuart Croft’s Drive In (2007), which presents a story trapped within the time of its own telling. In Flat Time Theory, an event’s time-base does not determine exact repetition; events change in structure and complexity with each iteration, affecting the fabric of flat time that informs them. Though the story being told repeats exactly, our experience and understanding expands with each retelling, changing the relationship of the present moment to the whole event. The relation of moments to the larger events they comprise is also a temporal tension in Jennifer West’s Salt Crystals Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Year Film... (2013), which documents the degradation of 70mm film stock given a mud bath in the Dead Sea, stored in a bucket for five years, then dragged across Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and washed in the Great Salt Lake. The resulting images are a product of chemical and mechanical erosion of the celluloid. The high-grade film stock, intended to capture a fraction of a second in incredibly fine detail, instead is used to document a much slower process. Spiral of Time Documentary Film... (2013) details this story in triple-exposed 16mm film, treated with hair dye, vinegar and brine. The repeated action of exposing the film to two of the world’s saltiest bodies of water, five years apart, gives the film a slowness despite the speed with which each individual frame is presented. Again, the five years become frequency, rather than duration. As West says: “the film may be further corroded now, but the digitised version lives as a document of its state in 2013.”1

1. From email correspondence with artist 1 November 2015.

Though best known for his highly acclaimed feature films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cactus River (2012) is an example of his experimental, deconstructed shorts, one that he shot and edited alone. It records a day spent with Jenjira Pongpas, star of four of his films, and her new American husband Frank, at

Claire Louise Staunton and John Hill

their home near the Mekong River in Northeast Thailand. The constancy of the flowing water provides the score to daily life, but, in this screening running counter to ERTH, the film’s frame rate decelerates until it comes to rest on a single still photograph. Parallel movements of time can again be seen in the film’s credits, where the Thai date 2555 is translated to English as 2012. At this point in Latham’s ERTH, the steady countdown in decremental units of time, passes itself, counting slower than time passes. Wojciech Bruszewski’s Y YAA (1973), an early example of the Polish film, video and digital artist’s deconstructions of language, sound and image, presents a single half-word scream that is held for an impossible three minutes, the note modulated in response to a system of randomly changing lighting. The artist uses the medium of film to stretch out a single act beyond human capability. According to Latham’s Flat Time Theory, the time-base of the event (the scream) remains constant even as its duration in clock time expands. Patrick Tarrant’s Phi Phenomenon 2 (2015) is a restaging of Morgan Fisher’s 1968 film Phi Phenomenon. Shot on outof-date stock, and featuring a clock fortuitously found on eBay, the film is the result of multiple experiments with hand processing. In the screening, Tarrant’s film coincides with the point in ERTH at which Latham spliced in a section of his earlier film Britannica (1970). Both the original Fisher film and Latham’s Britannica address, in different ways, the fact that we see movement in film where no actual movement is presented to the eye. The materiality of film is brought to the fore in Phi Phenomenon 2 to show that the strip of film bearing the clock’s image is moving, and it is moving fast. The programme concluded with Anne Tallentire’s Through Air, commissioned by FTHo and curator Lucy Reynolds for the exhibition Winter Garden in 2015. Coinciding with the emergence of the human scale in ERTH, at which point (wo) man comes into view, the repetition of a human breath captures one of the fundamental frequencies of life. The dispersal of matter on a molecular level is in symmetrical opposition to Mangan’s opening constellations of dust. As with Latham’s One Second Drawings, it is the structure, rather than the material, that allows us to find connections between events across a billion years.

Jennifer West, “Spiral of Time Documentary Film (16mm negative strobe-light double and triple exposed - painted with brine shrimp – dripped, splattered and sprayed with salted liquids: balsamic and red wine vinegar, lemon and lime juice, temporary flourescent hair dyes – photos from friends Mark Titchner, Karen Russo, Aaron Moulton and Ignacio Uriarte and some google maps– text by Jwest and Chris Markers’ Sans Soleil script – shot by Peter West, strobed by Jwest, hands by Ariel West, telecine by Tom Sartori)”, 9 minutes, 1 second, 2013. 16mm negative transferred to high-definition. Commissioned by Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Cactus River”, 2012, video, 10 min. 9 sec.

Wojciech Bruszewski, “Y YAA”, 1973, NTSC, b&w, 2 min. 58 sec. Courtesy of LUX, London.

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Screen 1 Nicholas Mangan, A World Undone, 2012. Keren Cytter, Der Spiegel, 2007. Stuart Croft, Drive In, 2007. Jennifer West, Spiral of Time Documentary Film (16mm negative strobe-light double and triple exposed - painted with brine shrimp dripped, splattered and sprayed with salted liquids: balsamic and red wine vinegar, lemon and lime juice, temporary flourescent hair dyes - photos from friends Mark Titchner, Karen Russo, Aaron Moulton and Ignacio Uriarte and some google maps- texts by Jwest and Chris Markers’ Sans Soleil script - shot by Peter West, strobed by Jwest, hands by Ariel West, telecine by Tom Sartori), 2013. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cactus River, 2012. Wojciech Bruszewski, YYAA, 1973. Patrick Tarrant, Phi Phenomenon 2, 2015. Anne Tallentire, Through Air, 2015.

Screen 2

John Latham, “ERTH”, 1971, 25 min. © The John Latham Foundation.

John Latham, ERTH, 1971. Jennifer West, Salt Crystals Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Year Film (70mm film negative floated in the Dead Sea and given a healing clay bath in extreme heat in 2008 - stuffed in a suitcase, placed in studio buckets, covered in clay and salt for five years - dragged along the salt encrusted rocks of the Spiral Jetty and thrown in the pink waters in 2013 in below 10 degree weather - Dead Sea floating and mud baths by Mark Titchner, Karen Russo and Jwest - Spiral Jetty dragging and rolling by Aaron Moulton, Ignacio Uriarte and Jwest - DIY telecine frame by frame of salt covered film by Chris Hanke), 2013.

Claire Louise Staunton and John Hill

Artists’ Biographies Israel-born Keren Cytter makes film, theatre and installation work and is best known for her textually based video art. Melbourne-based artist Nicholas Mangan makes film installations that investigate the relationship between energy and social transformation. Stuart Croft was a British artist film-maker whose work focuses on themes of power, recurrence, entrapment and desire.

Patrick Tarrant, “Phi Phenomenon 2”, 2015, 16mm transferred to video, 3 min.

American artist Jennifer West is known for her digital films that are made by hand, manipulating film celluloid. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a Thai independent film director, screen-writer and film producer. Film-maker Wojciech Bruszewski initiated and analysed complex relations of video/film representation, represented reality and the human perceptive-cognitive system. Patrick Tarrant, UK, is both a film-maker and a researcher with a specific interest in non-fiction modalities, from home video to documentary and the portrait film. British conceptual artist John Latham worked in mixed media and was a central figure in the UK countercultural scene from the 1960s. Anne Tallentire is an Irish feminist artist working with film and installation, examining the subtle movement of day-to-day life.

Anne Tallentire, “Through Air”, 2015, HD video, 6 min.

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Abstract The deep geological repository project for the long-term storage of radioactive material opens an encounter between design processes in the present and the “deep time” of 4.46 billion year futures. Beyond debates around ethics of responsibility to future generations, this article argues that what is invoked is a more radical futurity, where human thought confronts its contingency alongside nuclear timescales. Art practices play a key “stakeholder” role in imagining repository sites, in a context where they are both rooted in materialities of stochastic decay process and necessarily subject to interdisciplinary transformation. What specific knowledge can art practices give us in this context? What are their potentials and problems? And what could this mean for the historical conditions of “contemporary art”? The article does this by departing from the 2010 film Into Eternity and its production of awestruck ineffability through cinematic allusion to massive duration. Deep radiological times are proposed instead not as “eternity” but as “very large finitude” (Morton), not immeasurable, but as call to develop art practice through collective experimentation and technological augmentation. This extends Srnicek’s proposal for an “aesthetics of the interface” as a making operational of complex data through making it amenable to the senses, and sketches some propositions informing current practical work—drawing on multiple tools and technologies of future modelling as partial models or “fictions” (Laruelle), deployments of abductive reasoning, and a performative materiality of media as critical interrogation of its own interfacing technology.

Deep Decay: Into Diachronic Polychromatic Material Fictions Andy Weir Andy Weir is an artist and writer from London. His work investigates the concepts, affects and politics of deep time. Recent work on this includes “ThickDiachronic Crash” in Realism Materialism Art (2015); “Cosmic Alreadymades” in Journal of Curatorial Studies (2014); and “Instituting Art at the Outermost”

at Project Anywhere, New School, New York (2014). He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth, and PhD Researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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HADES Underground Laboratory, Mol, Belgium. Image courtesy Andy Weir.

t begins with a framing of formlessness. Mist or fog drifts in front of and around the camera. Surrounding forest sounds are intensified, becoming part of the hum of the plant. The camera tracks slowly from a road through penetrated granite or argillaceous limestone, while a disembodied voice connects the images. Its addressee is uncannily invoked, a “you” of the future, called into being from an imagined “we” of now. “This place should not be disturbed”, it cautions through a whisper, “this place is not a place for you”. Ignoring this, the camera moves on, sweeping across incised rock with mechanical crackle, sketching a landscape both invested with desire and radically indifferent to your gaze.

of an ethics of responsibility to an unknown future. This has been discussed as a semiotics of communication across generations, through the development of “markers” for the sites, a task picked up and developed by artists such as Cecile Massart.1

This is the opening of the 2010 film Into Eternity. It documents research at the Onkalo deep geological repository site in Finland, one of a number of sites currently being built or planned around the world for the long-term isolation and containment of radioactive materials. The voice points to the temporal confusion inherent to the project, opening questions Cecile Massart, “Mémoire du Futur”, 2011, installation view—Soulaines Site, Andra, France. Image courtesy the artist.

Andy Weir

Massart’s work, taking forms of projection, models, sketches, collaborations, and consultations, alludes to the complex nature of repository sites— bound up with contested speculative design, while rooted in the material reality of a stochastic decay process and mineral ray absorption. Art plays an important role in this context, while also necessarily being subject to interdisciplinary transformation. As Massart’s work “in the prehistory of transmission” also alludes to, however, this throw into the future can be extended further.2 Indeed, if repository design is to remain synchronous with the material fact of radiation, then it must be extended much further. The half-life of uranium-238, which makes up the majority of spent nuclear fuel, for example, is 4.46 billion years. This almost mirrors the 4.5 billion years from now speculatively proposed in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1991 work The Inhuman as time of the explosion of the sun, the consuming of philosophy and the terrestrial horizon.3 More immediately, the next ice age is predicted in between 6,000 and 20,000 years, while the Onkalo site is designed for 100,000 years of storage.4 Bearing the facts of these material timescales in mind, sites are designed “without future maintenance”, probing into a future where human engineers and scientists may no longer exist to monitor and control operations.5 The repository landscape captured with lingering shot and track in Into Eternity is one ultimately of complete indifference to its photographers and their cameras. As philosopher Ben Woodard has pointed out, the radical futurity invoked by the eco-crisis remains largely wedded to an

anthropocentric horizon—understood in terms of “our children” and future generations.6 The deep geological repository, however, embodies not only a call to future generations, captured as a narrative of protection in the film, but also a more radical confrontation with the death of human thought, and so its contingency alongside nuclear timescales. Through this projection of a future without maintenance, the site invokes a temporality indifferent to human care, that of the continuum of “deep time”. Its thinking and material construction is premised upon registering and modelling conditions, in the present, not entirely dependent on the priority of their human sensors. If the more radical futurity of the eco crisis, alluded to by Woodard, can be understood as the further and scientific removal of the human from the centre of the universe, then the deep geological repository registers and deepens this germ of trauma. This evokes the “truth of extinction” discussed in philosopher Ray Brassier’s Nihilism Unbound as “that which levels the transcendence ascribed to the human”—a non-anthropocentric awareness of the death of thought, which forces a disenchantment with our own privileged position at the centre of a world for us.7 Within an art context it is useful to return to and re-emphasise this as positive speculative opportunity, an “invigorating vector of intellectual discovery rather than a calamitous diminishment”,8 suggesting not the wallowing in melancholy affects of despair of annihilation and the alluring beauty of a paradoxical world-without-us, but as call for extensions of knowledge through new experimental material practices, building new collectives of augmented human and

1. Sebeok, Thomas. Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia: Technical Report. Columbus, OH: Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, 1984; An International Conference and Debate on the Preservation of Records, Knowledge & Memory of Radioactive Waste Across Generations. Centre Mondial de la Paix, Verdun, France, 15-17 September 2014. 2. Massart, Cecile. “Un Site Archive Pour Alpha, Beta, Gamma: Art”. See http:// cecile-massart-lisibilitedechets-radioactifs.com/ en/art-uk paragraph.3 (Accessed 2015-05-16.) 3. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. pp. 8-9. 4. Although current climate models suggest future ice ages have now been “put off ” due to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere produced through human activity. 5. Smudge Studio. “Containing Uncertainty: Design for Infinite Quarantine”. See http://smudgestudio. org/smudge/with/uncertainty/uncertain.html, 2010, paragraph 6 (Accessed 2015-05-16.) 6. Woodard, Ben. “The Deep Time of Ecological Politics”. Paper given at The Revolution of Time and Time of Revolution Conference, Binghampton, March 2011. 7. Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. p. 224. 8. Ibid, p. xi.

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non-human agencies, and demanding reinvention of the Earth where, “cognition grasps a real not of its own making, and… its capacities may be reshaped as a function of that real”,9 and as Brassier summarises in more recent work, “thought is embedded in the reality which it seeks to know”.10

The deep geological repository has acted as lure for a number of artistic projects. Artist duo Smudge Studio, for example, approached Onkalo in their project Containing Uncertainty (2010). Their work suggests a fascination with the site, described as a space of imagination “at the edges of cognition”, alluding to the problems and pleasures of grasping cosmic scales in the human mind.11 The work is fragmentary and multiple in its approach, reflecting this difficulty in cognising the space. It includes short essays, discussions, bullet point lists, Gneiss bedrock, a copper bracelet, bentonite clay models, and a schematic diagram of the repository architecture.

What is it though that is attempted to be grasped through these allusions? The repository, as Gabrielle Hecht has argued of “nuclearity” generally,12 and as Smudge Studio here suggest, is a complex and contested “thing” with wide-ranging political effects, “designating something as nuclear—whether in technoscientific, political or medical terms— carries high stakes. Fully understanding those stakes requires layering stories that are usually kept distinct.”13 As Hecht’s analysis shows, these stories are of asymmetric, power-inflected relations between intertwined human and non-human entities, including topologies of inside and outside, global markets, sandstone, ore, Neodymium, mined yellowcake, the occupational health of mine workers in eastern Gabon, colonial exploitation, and so on, which coalesce around the materials-for-storage. The deep geological repository, as site of activity and its operational conditions, presents a specific kind of problem, one that necessitates what Jussi Parikka has called for in a media archaeology that he aligns with art practice, “the investigation of the mineral and substrate materialities as well as the materialities of production, management of global labour processes, and various other materialities that are always entangled”.14 Such entangled materialities include my focus here—relations between human thought in the present, and the immense scales of so-called deep time—stretching back, while extending into projected and contested futures.

Smudge Studio, “Containing Uncertainty”, 2010. Artist schemata of Onkalo repository, 6’ x 10’, vinyl, created for the exhibition “Landscapes of Quarantine”, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2010. Image courtesy the artists.

James Hutton, Engraving after a drawing by John Clerk of Eldin (1787) of the unconformity at Jedburgh: Plate III in the Theory of the Earth Volume 1. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

This leads, then, to my main question: that of the role of art in imagining the deep geological repository as nuclear thing opened by deep time. What specific knowledge could art practices give us in this context? What are their potentials and problems? At the same time, and inversely, how could this temporal vector perhaps point to limits of and infect that set of conditions historically known as “contemporary art”?

Andy Weir

Uses of the term deep time can be traced to late-eighteenthcentury geology, attributed to James Hutton’s analysis of the geochemistry and angular unconformity at Siccar Point in Scotland. In his Deep Time of the Media, Siegfried Zielinski discusses an illustration from Hutton’s 1778 Theory of the Earth, which shows slate deposits plunging into the depths of the Earth, arguing that, through the visualisation of immense timescales, this image can be considered as stunning as Copernican depictions of the solar system in dislodging the Earth from the centre of the universe, “the idea of geological deep time is so foreign to us we can only understand it as metaphor”, Zielinski goes on to argue.15 These points are not unconnected, to be “stunned” by deep time is to focus on the attendant sense of human awe and wonder at such cosmic timescales, “the mind seemed to grow giddy looking so far into the abyss of time”, while metaphor suggests limiting knowledge by drawing it back into existing linguistic categories.16 This affect of wonder, reflected in the opening of Into Eternity, intensified and elongated through the slow track of the camera, the hushed narration, and the enveloping flatline drone with punctual crackle, is of course important in the context of Hutton’s Enlightenment deflating of biblical timescales. Solely being struck dumb by an image of the vastness of time, however, suggests, from our current situation, neither a productive position from which to gain knowledge nor to act.17 Rather than journeying “into eternity”, in reality, the deep time of the radiological is neither infinitely vast nor immeasurable. The uranium-238 half-life of 4.46 billion years has been measured, based on the probability of its nucleus to decay over time. This is a time that is difficult to imagine but it is not infinite. It is, in fact, to use a term deployed by philosopher Timothy Morton, a “very large finitude”.18 Morton uses this term to describe what he calls the “hyperobject” as a specific kind of object “massively distributed in time and space”.19 We are immanent to hyperobjects, a claim Morton describes as their quality of “viscosity”—we can have no critical distance from them as we are already immersed within their range. The hyperobject cannot be exhausted by perception, and the more we struggle to distance ourselves from it, the more “stuck” we become. While the hyperobject can be read as a finite object that is too vast to comprehend individually without technological augmentation, we can build tools to think it as complex abstraction—in

9. Mackay, Robin, Pendrell, Luke and Trafford, James (eds.). “Introduction”. Speculative Aesthetics. Falmouth: Urbanomic. 2014. pp. 1-6. 10 Brassier, Ray. “Delevelling: Against Flat Ontologies”. In Under Influence—Philosophical Festival Drift, 2014. Channa van Dijk et al. (eds.). Amsterdam: Omnia. 2015. p. 77. 11. Smudge Studio. “Containing Uncertainty”. See http:// smudgestudio.org/smudge/with/uncertainty/uncertain.html. 2010 (Accessed 2015-05-16.) 12. The concept is developed by Gabrielle Hecht in her analysis of the African uranium trade. It captures the asymmetrical and exclusive politics of regulation, acknowledging the social contexts and networks of implication for the designation and treatment of materials as nuclear, as well as the shifting and contested divide between nuclear and non-nuclear, “Nuclearity… is a contested technopolitical category. It shifts in time and space. Its parameters depend on history and geography, science and technology, bodies and politics, radiation and race, states and capitalism. Nuclearity is not as much an essential property of things as it is a property distributed among things.” Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2012. p. 14. 13. Ibid, p. 4. 14. Parikka, Jussi. “Decay Ecology: For An Alternative Deep Time”. O-Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies. No.1. “Object/Ecology”. Spring 2014. p. 11. 15. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2008. p. 8. 16. Hutton, James. Cited in Gould, Stephen J. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1987. p. 62. 17. As recent arguments suggest, both the framework of knowledge production and the imperative to “act” as humans are themselves undermined by deep time and the Anthropocene, requiring further critical discussion. See Zylinska’s call for a “minimal ethics” (Zylinska, Joanna. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. 2014) and Anderson’s criticism of claims to “save” the planet or “solve” the ecocrisis (Anderson, Kayla. “Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene”. Leonardo. Vol. 48. No. 4. 2015. pp. 338-347). 18. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press [e-book edition]. 2013. loc. 945. 19. Ibid, loc.772.

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this case, deploying techniques such as probability modelling and measuring ionising emission. Such abstractions suggest an important role for aesthetics beyond creating stunning images. Political theorist Nick Srnicek has proposed this in his argument for the importance of an “aesthetics of the interface” in mapping (what could be described as the hyperobject of) current neoliberalism. Srnicek argues for developing Fredric Jameson’s project of the cognitive mapping of capitalism in two stages. Firstly, in an age of algorithmic finance, pre-emptive data capture, off-shore networks, and so on, we must use available tools of technology and mathematics (computer algorithms, simulation models, econometrics, statistical analyses) to “extend cognition beyond sensible parameters of the human”.20 Secondly, to avoid being simply washed over by masses of intractable big data in a form of the technological sublime, we need a modulator between this technological representation of complex objects and the human cognitive system. It is here that he proposes aesthetics as “what sensibly mediates between individual phenomenology and our cognitive maps of global structures.”21 An aesthetics of the interface derives from mathematical representation, rendering it not as impenetrable noise but as cognitively tractable, suggesting “the expansion of sensible possibilities beyond human limitations”22 and inviting the challenge “to design interfaces in such a way that they offer the possibility of manipulating complex systems... the aesthetics of the interface is the mode of operationalising this complex knowledge into local phenomenologically amenable representations.”23 In the context of the repository, its enmeshing in deep timescales can be read not as immeasurable but as a call to augment and develop aesthetics through collective experimentation and technologies. Stuck, art practices cannot separate from the hyperobject to make an image of it in its entirety, but are opened by it, drawing from it.24 The interface does not claim to separate and make an image of the hyperobject, but is immanent to it, nor does it suggest a flat equivalence between connected entities. It is provisional, open to

Thomson & Craighead, “Hello World”, 2014. Image courtesy of the artists.

collective modification, and platform for extended human, (or non-humanistic) thought. It can be understood not jut as object but, as method, and art practices can be proposed as developing experimental interface methodologies for the deep geological repository. Artist duo Thomson & Craighead, for example, have proposed a nuclear semiotic totem as temporary index, a counter for representing the decay rate of nuclear waste products, 25 developing recent projects using art as a scaling device between big data and subject-amenable representations, including Hello World, a constantly updated measure of the current world population. Such work raises the question of how to draw on statistical data without only repeating the affective stun of Hutton’s image. An immediate reaction invoked by the work is to be struck with awe at the relation between oneself and immense global scales, an effect that could be described as the “Anthropogenic sublime”.26 This leads to the question, however, of “what next?”—how can this impact be drawn upon and extended without being instantiated as a limit?27 It is here that the aesthetics of the interface is important—aesthetics not as art’s description by philosophy, but as the (not entirely exhausted by human) aesthesis of sensing, considering aesthetic experience as structured by material regimes, and having political force. What kinds of subjectivities could be addressed by, modulated and organised around this encounter?

Andy Weir

Andy Weir, still from “The Plureal Deal”, 2016. Image courtesy the artist.

Concluding here suggests opening up to further research, as art practices take on tasks of developing such aesthetics, expanding this interface role through specific propositions. I will finish with two examples taken from my own current work. Firstly, The Plureal Deal is a project that sets itself the aim of hypothesising a material history of Plutonium, tracing a timescale from cosmic origins of uranium to billions

of years’ futures from within existing narratives and fictions of “the Real”, taken from contemporary corporate promotional culture.28

20. Srnicek, Nick. “Navigating Neoliberalism: Political Aesthetics in an Age of Crisis”. Paper delivered at The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object conference, Vassivière, France, 8-9 September 2012, p. 1.

hokkaido/ (Accessed 2015-05-16). For new work by the artists developed since this text was written, see http://www.carrollfletcher.com/exhibitions/52/overview/ (Accessed 2015-05-16.)

21. Ibid, p. 5.

26. Williams, Alex. “At The Dawn of the Anthropocene”. Paper delivered at War Against The Sun, MUTE, London, 26 May 2013. Robert Macfarlane, in a recent introduction to the Anthropocene, (“Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever”. The Guardian, 1 April 2016) describes human response to the immensity of ecological crisis through reference to Sionne Ngai’s term “stuplime”, capturing an affect that is stupefying (and also, in Ngai’s work, “stupid”, which suggests a further potentially undermining strategy actually against the sublime. See Ngai, Sionne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2009. p. 249). Such variations suggest, as Macfarlane’s project of constructing a crowdsourced Anthropocene Glossary illustrates, the need for new language and concepts drawing on and going beyond existing discourses such as the sublime.

22. Ibid, p. 8. 23. Ibid, p. 10. 24. “The earth as a mediating polis can only be thought through aesthetics derived from, not imposed upon, the computation of possible geometries, subdivisions, doubles, inversions, localizations, and Hubble-scale adoptions from the outside.” (Bratton, Benjamin. “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics”. e-flux Journal # 46, June 2013, paragraph 2. See http://www.e-flux.com/journal/some-trace-effects-of-thepost-anthropocene-on-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/ (Accessed 2015-05-16). 25. Triscott, Nicola. “Nuclear Culture in Japan”. 2014. See http://nicolatriscott. org/2014/08/11/nuclear-culture-in-japan-part-1-actinium-programme-sapporo-

In attempting to trace Plutonium futures, the work leads to encounters and discussions with repository teams on how such long-term futures are projected. These include computational and mathemati-

27. A question addressed in this case, for example, through the specific aesthetic form of the ritualistic totem. 28. A stuplime aim, emphasising its stupidity as strategy, perhaps.

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cal models alongside other strategies, such as risk analysis and scenario planning, algorithmically predicting and staging potentially interruptive events. The material history of the future refracts into multiple provisional “partial models”, with the interface acting as a collecting platform for their laying out and critical reflection.29 Secondly, Pazu-goo, a gooey, collectively modifiable uranium glow-stick waving Pazuzu, the SumeroAsyrrian demon of contagion, epidemic and dust, is

proposed as an intervention into the deep geological repository marker project, addressed to the future. Through workshops and shared instructions, designs are 3D printed in Nylon 12, encased in clay tablets and flushed into local water supplies, perhaps later discovered as artefacts, or left to slowly degrade and form new molecular configurations through ingestion and drift. Addressing the question of what it might mean to extend the marker project to an indifferent future without maintenance leads to a

Andy Weir, Pazu-goo: 3D Printed Deep Geological Repository Marker for a Future Posthuman Palaeoarcheologist (c.700 BC—4.6 x 109 AD). Image courtesy the artist.

Andy Weir

focus away from intergenerational communication and onto the literal materiality of the work itself. Through additive printing, Nylon powder is layer-fused from object code, exhibited, then thrown into waste. Following waste circuits, microplastics persist, ingested and accumulated into the bodies and tissues of marine organisms, bloating gastrointestinal tracts. The work continues life as bioplastic assemblage, becoming part of five trillion plastic particles in the Earth’s oceans, while Pazuzu is figured as demonic scavenger of this molecular body: Each particle of dust carries with it a unique vision of matter, movement, collectivity, interaction, affect, differentiation, composition and infinite darkness—a crystallised data base or a plot ready to combine and react… Pazuzu specialises in scavenging the stratified Earth and its biosphere in the form of dust, which then is uplinked to alien currents flowing in the universe.30 Premised on the strangeness of its guiding idea that waste could just be hidden away in a passive “Earth”, separated from an unaffected “humanity”, the repository marker makes the implausible claim of containing a specific site and duration, proposing to mark a barrier that can’t really exist.31 Pazu-goo, on the other hand, parasites on local sites to become an “anti-marker”. The anti-marker focuses on leakage, non-containment and the speculative potential of future transformations of humans in dynamic relation and alliance

with other entities across scales. This is practised not as metaphor or sign, but through its own performative materiality, drifting from dump to sea, navigating from local sites towards a universal ungrounding current of deep time. Art can be an experimental platform for building multiple “diachronic material fictions” that think the deep geological repository as futurology, excavating its political stake. From one perspective, this is important as artists are stakeholders in an ongoing industry consultation process, demanding critical reflection on what this could mean beyond the instrumentalisation of making seductively stunning images. From another perspective, our understanding of the “contemporary” of contemporary art is subject to traumatic reconfiguration, amplified alongside inhuman scale, refracted through multiple interface methods. Finally, developing the ideas of thinkers such as Parikka, who proposes “concrete and long-term investment in geological times of media as crucial for processes of subjectivation”, we can consider what it means to think production and circulation of these fictions as constitutive of radical, processes of subjectification, opened and cut across by deep time.32

29. Setting up a relation with Francois Laruelle’s description of “fictions” as partial models alongside the Real. See Laruelle, Francois. Photo-Fiction – A Non-Standard Aesthetics. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. 2012. In this case avoiding reducing the future to specific singular models, for example, in using simulation to legitimate nonintervention in geohydrological process, while, at the same time, not making its reality ungraspable. 30. Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: re.Press. 2008. p. 88. p. 113. 31. Ben Woodard, writing on the repository project, picks up on the striking “oddness of a purportedly permanent solution in a purportedly dead Earth”, not only in creating this artificial binary between “human” and “waste” but also denying any power to matter and the Earth to propagate new forms of life. See Woodard, Ben. On An Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy. New York, NY: punctum. 2013. p. 67. 32. Parikka, op. cit., p.7.

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Abstract In the summer of 2014, poets Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren and Jenny Tunedal were working together in a translation workshop via Skype that had been ongoing for more than a year. When war broke out in Gaza, where El-Sousi lives and works, this translation workshop transformed into a daily conversation on war, despair, food, rooms, objects, women, children, mothers, intimacy, fear, news, weather and writing. The differences and distances always present in translation work became enhanced and acute, as did a sense of closeness. The circumstances of war cut into our work and somehow into the everyday quotidian life of Sweden; as a shock, as a difference, as an acute experience of a lack of experience. The computer screen became, in El-Sousi’s words: “a blue window of hope”; the hope of continuing, linearity, future. Continuity is complicated for anyone living in Gaza. Life is a secluded incarceration, not only in space but maybe even more so in time. Future as well as political and personal history are constantly being cut off from and/or conditioned by a claustrophobic present. The disaster that war is adds enormous pressure and fear to this present, to the extent that chronological time seems almost entirely dissolved.

Translating 51 Days: These Texts are not Memories Somaya El-Sousi

Hanna HallgreN

Somaya El-Sousi is a poet and a researcher at the Palestinian Planning Centre Office at the Department of Social Issues. The Centre is a governmental office in Gaza doing research on politics, economy and social issues. As a researcher she writes studies and reports, all published by the Centre in the Palestinian Planning Centre Magazine and distributed in Gaza. She has published four books of poetry: The First Sip of Sea Breeze (1998), Doors (2003), Lonely Alone (2005), Idea, Space, Whiteness (2005, together with the poet Hala El Shrof Shier). El-Sousi’s poetry has been translated into English, Swedish, Greek and Norwegian. An ongoing project is “‘The city’—literary prose on life in Gaza and its contradictions”, from which articles have been published in El Ayyam newspaper in Ramallah and translated into English, French, Swedish and Korean.

Hanna Hallgren is a poet, literary critic and Professor of Literary Composition, University of Gothenburg. She has a doctorate degree in gender studies and is a member of several research networks, such as RAW (The Network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies) and EUFRAD (The European Forum for Research Degrees in Art and Design). She is one of the founders of the new Centre for Gender and Language at Linnæus University. Hallgren has published several articles and presented papers at numerous conferences. She is the author of six books of poetry: Ett folk av händer (2001), Burqa (2003), Jaget är människans mest framträdande sinnessjukdom (2008), Manlighet (together with poet Johan Jönson, 2009), Roslära (2012) and Prolog till den litterära vetenskapsteorin (2014).

Jenny Tunedal Jenny Tunedal is a poet, literary critic, translator and Senior Lecturer at Valand Academy, Gothenburg. She has published translations of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and is the author of four books of poetry: Hejdade, hejdade sken (2003), Kapitel Ett (2008), Handflata: Du ska också ha det bra (2009) and Mitt krig, sviter (2011).

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1. Hind Juda’s texts have since been published online, in New Internationalist Magazine, translated into English by Ibithal Mahmood. See http://newint.org/features/ web-exclusive/2014/08/26/ gaza-53-seconds (Accessed 2016-07-14.) 2. Lamarre, Thomas. Mechademia 4 War/Time. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 3. Juda, Hind. “Eight O’Clock”. 4. El-Sousi, Somaya. The art of living in Gaza. Translated by Christina Phillips, published online at https://palestineinsight.net/category/ somaya-el-sousi/ (Accessed 2016-07-14.) 5. Mourtaja, Rana. “Diary of a Third War Passing”. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

A conversation between Hanna Hallgren, Somaya El-Sousi and Jenny Tunedal This conversation piece was created through a communal writing process. Its main source of material were texts by Palestinian writers Mona Abu Shark, Hind Juda, Rana Mourtaja, Najwa Shimon and Somaya El-Sousi, written between 6 July and 26 August 2014. They were gathered by Somaya El-Sousi and Serin Fathi and translated from Arabic into Swedish by Anna Jansson for the ongoing research project Translating 51 days, a project that grew out of the translating workshop that Hanna Hallgren, Somaya El-Sousi and Jenny Tunedal started in Ramallah in 2011, and that was interrupted, changed, transformed by the war in Gaza in the summer of 2014.1 Hanna Hallgren (HH) Somaya El-Sousi (SES) Jenny Tunedal (JT) “War and everyday life are inseparable, and both our daily time or temporality and our historical moment are conditioned in war.”2

1. Gaza Time SES: Hind Juda writes: “Indifferent time / I wait for you to pass by like an unusual woman in love does in an uncommon country / when she tries to find out if the missiles have

ravished her beloved / He who said he would come at eight / Time doesn’t move anymore”3 In a text about the skills of living in Gaza I once wrote: “The first of these skills is the ability to interact with time. I don’t mean that time is important, to such a great extent, in this city. On the contrary: in Gaza there is a great surplus of time, which you must know how to use up, how to get rid of, in every possible way, as there are no important appointments binding you to your schedule, and no particularly sacred or respected times. Everything is possible at any time, and it’s up to you to kill time as you see fit. So you either remain a prisoner in your own home, workplace, or wherever it is that you know and that knows you, or you think of other ways to kill time. Whatever you do will lead you to the same result in the end: you will make it as far as your pillow, at night, with a sense of absolute futility. You will be unable to find anything to think of other than fleeing from your self, the self that asks itself constantly until when? And what will you do tomorrow? And how are you going to spend the rest of your life?”4 HH: The incarceration of the people of Gaza is not only a spatial but also a temporal one. Wartime can be perceived as an extreme tightening of a temporal closure. Time to kill versus Time to get killed or not.

Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna HallgreN and Jenny Tunedal

2. The Diary JT: Rana Mourtajas’ “Diary of a third war passing” uses the specific—although disputed—clock time of 53 seconds, a time range that became known as the amount of time between the so-called “knock on the roof ”—the warning missile—and the ensuing bombing of the house. Mourtaja writes:

What time is this time which leaves you with no choices. To die or to die. Because when you lose your beloved things and memories you are also dying.

3. Writing Time

“‘Fifty-three seconds or less’—or, if you have the luck of a four-leaf clover, you might think ‘or more’ in your head. Here is my definition of what I’ve called a ‘warning missile’: it is a password ushering me through a gateway into the daily hell of Gaza.”5

JT: Rana Mourtaja writes: “Forgive me, but how do I go back to my life, loaded with the guilt of still being alive, of still breathing? Note that, while asking the question, I seem to have relegated the possibility of me dying in the next few days of this.”6

Turning the warning missile into a password, a piece of violent language, Mourtaja ushers her body, and the reader, into daily hell: daily as in the normal and extreme; the continuity of the exceptional, the exceptional continuity of war, the chronic crises of Gaza. Hell is where bodies burn. Daily hell is where bodies are constantly conditioned by fear. An everyday emergency.

While asking the question. Or rather, while writing the question the possibility of dying is relegated, postponed. The writer writing her body out of wartime and into a different time, writing time. To write is the opposite of dying. The language of literature re-establishes the severed ties to continuity.

SES: “Is 53 seconds long enough to gather my soul?” When you read that a seventeen-year-old girl writes this, what can you think? She wanted to collect everything she loves and needs to keep in her life in 53 seconds. The time between the warning rocket and the attack. Attacking the house to destroy it completely. She is aware of the fact that material things can be collected. But what about soul, what about memories, what about the room where you read your first book, or wrote your first letter. Many, many things you can’t take with you if you are suddenly forced to leave your house and you only have 53 seconds.

“I’m still alive because death is the easiest way out of war, and life is the hardest way of all.” 7 (Rana Mourtaja)

SES: When I write I feel like a normal person, I still have this, I am still writing.

4. Method HH: Somaya, we have translated in wartime, and in times of non-war. I am not sure if one can call it peace. I am not sure what you would say. More peaceful days? In the summer of 2014, and during war, we translated again. This time not only your poems. You, Jenny, my friend Serin and I started to gather materials written by women—writers and journalists—in Gaza. Texts written during war. Texts in English or in Arabic. As a method in war.

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I am not sure how to define our method, its causes and effects. To me it became a strategy to handle life, to master at least something, and trying to get the texts published as a means to let voices from Gaza be heard. What is a method in war, or alongside war? To collect testimonies? Witnesses? To collect fears and hopes? Trying to create some kind of normality? And everyday life in a timeless time? The relief in the evening when I heard your voice. The despair of knowing what you all went through, its causes and effects. The despair of not knowing, as in understanding, what you all went through. Knowing your voice became my hope. Not knowing what to do. To be able to do almost nothing. To eat your voice as a bread. * Live through this with me. We tried to keep words fresh, not to swallow death. It was a work of translation. * We are Forgetful as leaves. In a common garden I never saw with my own eyes, smells I never smelled, children I never held. We call it the blue window of hope, one we first opened in Ramallah in 2011. Our common threshold.

4. Now Is a Narrow Room SES: “How normal these texts are: an everyday life, it is not strange for us but it will be strange for the others who read.”8

JT: The temporality of the diary: notations, speed, immediacy. The temporality of the prose poem; a dense, supersaturated time: All this writing, with a very short life expectancy. What are these texts during the war? What are they after? How do I, my unmarked body, become their imagined reader, and if I do, how do they address me? As an other / it will be strange for me / when I read. Do these texts address bodies outside of war? Does a writer during war address bodies after war? SES: For me I was writing just to feel I am still alive. This war does not kill me, it does not kill the hope inside me. Writing for the writer herself and then for the others.

5. The List / Being a Mother JT: Mona Abu Sharkh writes: SES: “Being a mother in Gaza means spending more time imagining the death of your children than planning for their future. Being a mother in Gaza means that you might see your son die in your arms without having the right to mourn. Being a mother in Gaza means you have to sow your son’s wounds together with a needle to stop his bleeding and give him some more time. Being a mother in Gaza means finding your daughter’s hand on top of a cupboard after her funeral. Being a mother in Gaza means hearing your child cry out for help under a collapsed building and not being able to save him because you are stuck a few metres away, under the same rubble. Being a mother in Gaza means your house collapses as you are unconscious and

Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna HallgreN and Jenny Tunedal

when you wake you find your children’s limbs around you. Being a mother in Gaza means a deadly bullet hits you while you breastfeed your child, you die and the milk pours from your chest, rich and life-giving. Being a mother in Gaza means you and your children are safe targets for death.”9

The time we wait as Palestinians living in Gaza is also stolen time. When we wait for electricity to come on after long hours of darkness, when we wait and wait for a permit to leave Gaza in order to go to a hospital in the West Bank, and if you are lucky you will get this permit before you die from your bad illness.

JT: Life expectancy: 53 seconds, 51 days This is biopolitics.

Our childhood is also stolen, because the children of Gaza have no right to play freely, they have to perform many adult duties and they will always see playing time as luxury.

53 seconds 51 days

6. Stolen Time SES: No one will think that time can be stolen, but it is in Gaza; the moment that you want to spend with your friend, the hours of travelling, the laughter after a joke. It is stolen from you because you simply didn’t get the permit to travel from Gaza. This happened to me last year when I was invited to a conference in Sweden. I prepared everything. My friends Hanna and Jenny also prepared to spend beautiful time with me, and Hanna even booked a restaurant to celebrate my birthday in. We had lots of dreams to meet, talk, work on our translation and many other things. But all this was stolen from us by the Israeli refusal to let me go. We were all shocked. And this is what I mean by stolen time. This is not the only time that is stolen: many times all our lifetime is stolen. When a sudden rocket destroys a house and kills all the people who live in it, this family is no longer alive, its future has ended and all this for no reason.

7. The Poem / The Address HH: “Eight O’Clock” a poem by Hind Juda “It’s seven o’clock on a Friday morning / Will the war continue? / Will we keep on Looking for the children’s smiles / after every missile / trying to find out who is Missing and who was not heedful enough / Who got replaced by a surprised gaze Tearing the heart apart Indifferent time / I wait for you to walk like an uncommon loving woman does in an Uncommon country / when she tries to find out if the missiles have ravished her beloved He who said he would be there at eight / Time doesn’t move anymore At eight o’clock / I am silent / my senses turns to a distant void / my Ears get ready to descry the grenades /

8. Quote from one of many Skype conversations between HH, SES and JT. 9. Abu Shark, Mona. “Being a Mother in Gaza”.

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Are they coming here? / Are they going away? My throat will eventually dry while I wait for the clock to become eight! Next hour / who will stay in the remote port of Gaza / to point out the city’s sleepiness Gaza yawns, she doesn’t reach out the wounded hand / to cover her mouth and to live Yet an ordinary morning / Doesn’t get ready for prayer, and patiently purify herself Before it.” There is a certain time, one may call it marked It differs from unmarked quotidian time, since its seconds and hours Simultaneously weigh too little and too much A marked time, presenting life as a fragile urn in the sand, Presenting voices as screams, or voices as mute witnesses, Seconds and hours are torn apart, ravished, Abducted time and pointless pointers, a sore in the clock face Where time runs out There is a certain time, one may call it: of uneasiness When all you can do is to check your mailbox, the news, updates On Facebook, and work with translations as means to Be, become, sustain and connect Cyborgs of hope and despair; are you online tonight? Are you OK? The pointers swarms in a face, sharp pointers, pierce Waiting for the wound to fester A clockwork of drones A generator when time does not move Radical closure, surpassing disaster: How long is that night, how hard is that darkness?

8. When You Become the News10 JT: Mona Abu Shark writes: “The scene from the outside is the same scene we watch every day on the television screen, with only small differences in the details, for example that what comes out of the ambulance is only human body parts, or a child with a hole in its stomach or head. Did you get used to this scene, or does it bore you, do you switch channels to find the series The Seven Commandments?”11 Rana Mourtaja writes: “Will we remain just figures, added or subtracted, after the war ends? Will journalists, bloggers, social media users ever understand that those who died weren’t merely numbers and names, but were stories that were being told and that continue to be told? The same goes for those who lost their limbs, and those critically injured who wait to join the numbers of deaths in the next few days or months. Will people ever understand that a demolished home isn’t just four walls? When will I stop hearing ‘Heaven sent, and heaven stole’, or ‘Better to lose money than lives’? Those homes carried the sweat of fathers and the sacrifices of mothers, the laughter of children and the rebellion of teenagers, the sleepless nights of adults and the dementia of the elderly, the family dinners on Fridays and the whispers of prayers on Sundays.” SES: “Wars are not similar to each other. Each war has its whine, its pain, its black memory that digs into us.” “No one can get used to this way of living, each day a new day with its own set of rules, surrounded by the souls of martyrs rising to heaven.” “Today, tomorrow, the following day. The coming days, the same fear in all the forms you know and yet not know.”12

Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna HallgreN and Jenny Tunedal

This night

SES: To translate the bodies into names.

An ordinary day / the sea

JT: To translate the bodies into words.

9. An Ordinary Day / The Sorrow JT: Several texts address the lack of a language to describe the war. A lack connected to time. The now overshadows the past and the future. There is no experience, only sensation. The question becomes important. HH: The news images replacing language. The pace of images replacing the slowness of poetry. SES: The speed of the news. The speech of the news. It takes such a long time to live, to mourn. 51 days and nights. 1,224 hours. Approximately. JT: Is that the length of summer. Is that the length of surpassing disaster.13 HH: No. Is there time in disaster? Is there withdrawal of time? SES: No. There is time. No. There is no time. JT: To translate the number of hours. HH: To translate the number of bodies.

HH: To translate the names into stories. SES: Too many stories, too little time. It would take hours and hours and summers and summers. HH: How long does war take? JT: “Gaza longs for life / wants to caress her shattered houses / wants to kiss her martyrs one last eternal time”14 SES: Gaza longs for time. Time to mother, time to mourn; because mourning is to be in the living body, mourning is to have time to connect the living body to its loss.

10. “When you become the news” is the title of a poem by Somaya El-Sousi, translated by El-Sousi, Tunedal and Hallgren and published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on 14 July 2014. 11. Mourtaja, Rana. “A home isn’t just four walls”. 12. El-Sousi, Somaya. “It does not end”. 13. “Surpassing disaster” as in Jalal Toufic’s notion of ”the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster”. Toufic, Jalal. The withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster. Beirut: Forthcoming Books. 2009. 14. Juda, Hind. “Gaza longs for life”.

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Abstract This writing and these images describe an ongoing curatorial enquiry by artist and curator Jason E. Bowman with the artist group The Theatre of Mistakes, founded in London in 1974 by writer, dancer and performer Anthony Howell. For the 2015 PARSE conference on Time, Bowman invited Howell to deliver a workshop based on the Theatre of Mistakesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; self-published volume Elements of Performance Art (1976), co-authored by Howell and Fiona Templeton. Practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds gathered to reconstruct, then perform games-based and instructional exercises originally distilled by the company between 1974 and 1976. Bowmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s writing considers the temporalities processed when curating the works and practices of a disbanded performance collective. The still images are of a performance at the conference derived from the workshop and the entire videoed event is available via the online publication.

Towards a Purposeful Accident: Elements of Performance Art via The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes Jason E. Bowman

Anthony Howell

Jason E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice. He is MFA Fine Art Programme Leader at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. He was a co-researcher on the Swedish Research Council funded project Trust and Unfolding Dialogue (with Principal Investigator Esther Shalev-Gerz), for which he edited the volume, Esther Shalev-Gerz: The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainty and Unfolding Dialogues (Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2013). He curated the inaugural European career survey of the practice of Yvonne Rainer in live dance, film, teach-ins and public readings (Tramway, Glasgow, 2010) and in 2017 will curate a survey of the work of the Theatre of Mistakes in live performance, artefact and document at Raven Row, London. He is currently Principal Researcher (with co-researchers Mick Wilson and Julie Crawshaw) on Stretched, a three-year long enquiry into artist-led cultures, also funded by the Swedish Research Council.

A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell was an editor of Wallpaper Magazine and founder of The Theatre of Mistakes, which performed at the Paris Biennale, the Theater for the New City and the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. He is editor of Grey Suit: Video for Art and Literature. His solo performances have been seen at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. He teaches Tango for Balanceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for people with Parkinsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Disease. His book The Analysis of Performance Art was published by Routledge in 1999. He is also a poet whose first collection, Inside the Castle, was published in 1969. His novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars in 1986. His articles on visual art, dance, performance and poetry have appeared in many publications. He is a contributing editor of the Fortnightly Review.

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Working without a watch and without a tapemeasure, the performance artist may come to rely on a sense of “performance time”—where yards are expressed by strides and feet by paces, where minutes are expressed by counts and, where time and space are expressed by any means that may be devised.1 Having moved home in 2006 I unpacked books that had been in storage. I re-discovered a slim, A5 format, comb-bound publication with silver embossed text on black card covers entitled Elements of Performance Art by Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton.2 Consequently a curatorial enquiry began on how to research, conceptualise and realise a survey of the practices and artworks (of which this publication is an early exemplar) of a disbanded interdisciplinary art collective, active from their base in London and internationally from 1974 until 1981, known initially as The Ting, then subsequently as The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes, and finally as The Theatre of Mistakes. Writer and dancer Anthony Howell instigated The Ting in 1971 through an initial set of interdisciplinary experiments, which by 1974 had become The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes, a collaborative itinerant platform for co-devising performances from a series of instructions and game-based exercises co-authored at advertised open sessions between 1974 and 1976. Contributions (“soundings”) were recorded in written notes in what is referred to as The Gymnasium. In 1975 core members Anthony Howell, Fiona Templeton, Michael Greenall and Patricia Murphy performed The Street, which drew from the exercises of The Gymnasium and was structured by additive triggering, which would become an implicit method also in future works.3 In 1976 The Soundings logged in The Gymnasium were refined, edited and introduced by Howell and Templeton and self-published by The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes as Elements of Performance Art

in an initial edition of 60 (1976) and in a revised edition of 800 (1977). Designed as an instructional manual with an introductory manifesto, Elements of Performance Art explicates The Ting: The Theatre of Mistakes’ ethos and methods of production against six convergent elements: conditions, body, aural, time/space, equipment and manifestation, with a total of 42 exercises to be structured via chance, allowing for multiple formations and focalised structures. From 1976 the collective became less concerned with instigating open events and happenings, and thus began a further five years of collaborative works devised by a core membership of Michael Greenall, Anthony Howell, Glenys Johnson, Miranda Payne, Peter Stickland and Fiona Templeton towards formalist performances that were highly structured by internalised systems and rules yet incorporated the potential for mishaps and slip-ups. This included what is seen to be their signature performance work, Going (1977), in which each performer seeks to be the others through a complex structuring of aural mimicry and physical mirroring. The multiple processes and forms of research conducted to date have included locating both consistent members and sporadic affiliates of the collective in order to gain a multi-perspectival narration, but also access to personal and institutional records. Unlike many of their peers working in performance at that time, this collective laid great emphasis on documentation and kept exhaustive records, which has led to the cataloguing of almost 4,000 pieces of ephemera, such as correspondence between the members of the collective, institutions, curators, funding bodies and other artists and practitioners; drafts of and notations on prefatory manifestos, scripts and instructions for works; promotional materials and reviews; diagrams for performances outlining the temporal-spatial dynamics of durational works; video, audio and photographic documentation and objects, props and costumes.4 This material—possibly less of an archive and more a collection—describes the collective’s organisational

Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell

impulses and its incremental decisionmaking procedures both in terms of actual production and also preparation, including years of peer-working and intermittent experimentation at a rural farm in Hampshire, and through a cultural milieu in which it interfaced with artist-led spaces, such as The Dairy (also the home of London Film-makers’ Co-op), Artslab and studio complexes, and institutional frameworks, including Arts Council and galleries such as the Serpentine, the Hayward and Arnolfini. Work was also developed internationally, including at the Biennale de Paris, the Stedelijk Museum, The Belgrade Student Centre, and at commercial galleries such New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery, as well as in unexpected situations such as the Pittsburgh State Penitentiary. An abundance of residual material is available that will shape my curatorial intercession, not only documentation of finalised art works but also of the methods and procedures of The Theatre of Mistakes’ collectivised practices. Knowledge being produced includes the designation of a vivid turn within curating towards the restaging and remediation of performance and temporalised practices of the era shared by the company; a commitment to discursive and apperceptive processes and approaches between myself as curator, ex-members and associates of the collective, the director and representatives of Raven Row (the gallery where the exhibition, Accidentally on Purpose: The Theatre of Mistakes will occur in Summer 2017). A further repercussion is also at play, one that we may think of less as related to exhibition-making and more in terms of making an exhibition “happen”.

The happenstance, coincidence or accidental nature of finding Elements of Performance Art has become a generative spoor for ten years of intermittent research, the sporadic nature of which has demanded a heterochronic curatorial methodology that weaves between the engrossment of the people involved, heterogeneously interrogating the records of their art to uncover criss-crossed patterning of processes over the collective’s lifespan, and the temporal complexities of the programme and working practices of the gallery in which the project is to be sited (as Raven Row has, since 2009, been dedicated to unearthing and exhibiting like-minded, obscured or purposefully marginal practices and art works). An implication of an approach such as heterochronic curating is that it acts in contrast to the teleological impulses that seek a chronological narrativisation, an approach that is often sui generis to how institutions organise and delineate the notion of retrospection when making survey exhibitions. The approach towards making Accidentally on Purpose happen has, until now, temporally traversed concepts such as art historian Michael Baxandall’s thesis on “the periodic eye” as a means to consider how visuality is formed and perceived within social relations and cultural practices of a given time; the implications of conducting ethnographic research via cultural theorist Irit Rogoff’s conceptualisation of “gossip as testimony”, a route towards recognising multi-perspectival complicities and contradictions of fact, sensibility, opinion and concept as productive of exchange; and curator Beatrice von Bismarck’s notion of exhibiting as a temporalised “type of action” that produces multiple

1. Howell, Anthony and Fiona Templeton. Elements of Performance Art. London: The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes. 1976. p. 7. 2. Ibid. 3. As if a game were at play, the mediation of elements of choice or chance would allow for “mistakes” to occur. Accordingly, the recognition of a mistake would then activate (trigger) another series of choices, rules or instructions. 4. Research on this process was conducted collaboratively, in 2008-2009, with art historian Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio.

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5. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988; Rogoff, Irit. “Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature”. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, Griselda Pollock (ed.). London: Routledge. 1996. pp. 58-65.; Von Bismarck, Beatrice. “Introduction”. In Cultures of the Curatorial 2 Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rike Frank, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Jörn Schafaff, Thomas Weski (eds.). Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2012. pp. 7-10.

relations between the actors involved, physical materials and objects and in this case a recurrent spectre of erstwhile performances.5 Hence, the happening towards this exhibition has sought neither to follow a linear chronology nor backtrack through one. The interrogation of things and people has not been sequential. New things appear, discussions continue, complicities and disagreements arise and logistics permeate—each providing filters through which the exhibition becomes consequential. In 2015, however, I clarified that I was about to curate an exhibition including live works for which I was actually too young to have seen and so an interstice

in the research process was prompted and a reoccurrence put into play with Theatre of Mistakes founder Anthony Howell. We returned to Elements of Performance Art where he and the collective had more or less begun, and where I had also started (though with three decades in between). Over two days we revisited and work-shopped the exercises gathered in the publication with a group of volunteers. The findings of working with the soundings were made public at Time, the 2015 PARSE conference, and a subsequent decision was made to then include such a venture in the exhibition at Raven Row. Another curatorial coincidence will become consequential.

Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell in conversation regarding the impetus for Elements of Performance Art. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell

Jason E. Bowman interrupted by Anthony Howell responding to an initial triggering of exercises from Elements of Performance Art. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

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Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell responding to and creating triggers of exercises from Elements of Performance Art. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

Workshop participants responding to and creating triggers of exercises from Elements of Performance Art. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell

Workshop participants responding to and creating triggers of exercises from Elements of Performance Art, continued. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

PARSE Journal

Workshop participants responding to and creating triggers of exercises from Elements of Performance Art, continued. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

Jason E. Bowman and Anthony Howell

Workshop participants responding to and creating triggers of exercises from Elements of Performance Art, continued. Photograph by Kjell Caminha.

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Abstract Zeitraum (German for “timespan”, literally “time space”) is a sound environment exposing the interrelation of time and space in acoustic communication. The environment is composed of many identical sound sources dispersed irregularly in a large space, playing an aleatoric ostinato of percussive sounds. When listened to from a particular location (the “sweet spot”), the pattern is perceived as an accented but isochronous beat. The ostinato is structured such that the sounds from all sources arrive with the same delay at the sweet spot, compensating for the differences in propagation time. When walking away from the sweet spot, the regular pulse gets more and more distorted as the distances to all sound sources change and with them the propagation delays from the sources to the listener. What starts as almost imperceptible deviations and passes through various areas with different kinds of grooves, ends up in a rhythmically completely disrupted and apparently chaotic sequence of events when listened to from far off the sweet spot. By moving about, the audience explores a space literally made out of time, a time space—a bewildering experience enacted through one’s locomotion, revealing the always baffling relativity of observation.

Zeitraum

Gerhard Eckel Gerhard Eckel uses sound to explore ways of world making. He aims at articulating the aesthetic and epistemic dimensions of sound art, understanding artistic experience as a hybrid of action, perception and reflection. His works are the result of research processes drawing on the practice and theory of music composition, sound art, choreography and dance, installation art, interaction design and digital instrument making. He is Professor of Computer Music and

Multimedia at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz. He also serves as Affiliated Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and as Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Besides his artistic work and teaching, he leads publicly funded transdisciplinary research projects and supervises scholarly and artistic doctoral research.

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Gerhard Eckel, “Zeitraum Online”, 2016. This work is available as a multimedia installation online at http://parsejournal.com/ZeitraumOnline

Zeitraum is a sound environment exposing the

interrelation of time and space in acoustic communication and the implications thereof for music and sound art. The environment is composed of many identical sound sources distributed over a large space, playing an aleatoric ostinato of percussive sounds. When listened to from a particular location, the pattern is perceived as an accented but isochronous beat. The ostinato is structured such that the sounds from all sources arrive with the same delay at one particular (reference) location, compensating for the differences in propagation time. When walking away from that location, the regularity of the pulse gets more and more distorted as the distances to all sound sources change and with them the propagation delays from the sources to the listener. What starts as almost imperceptible deviations, and passes through various areas with different kinds of grooves, ends up in a rhythmically completely disrupted and apparently chaotic sequence of events when listened

to from far off the reference location. By moving about, the audience explores a space literally made out of time, a time space—a bewildering experience enacted through one’s locomotion, revealing the always baffling relativity of observation. Zeitraum marks the end point in a series of case studies conducted in the course of the artistic research project The Choreography of Sound.1 The work was created to embody central research results and make them accessible through aesthetic experience. With Zeitraum, an aesthetic formulation of some of the basic constraints shaping the composition of spatial sound textures has been found, while touching upon fundamental conceptual and artistic conditions of possibility in electro-acoustic music composition and sound art. Zeitraum exists in different formulations.2 Zeitraum Online was developed for the digital edition of

Gerhard Eckel

PARSE journal. It is based on Zeitraum Göteborg, which was created for the courtyard of the Academy of Music and Drama in Göteborg as a contribution to the first biennial PARSE conference on Time in 2015. Zeitraum Online employs standardised web browser audio technology (the Web Audio API) to enable an interactive experience. It uses sound samples of the sound sources used in Zeitraum Göteborg (electromagnetically struck tubular bells), binaural rendering, convolution reverb, and a graphical interface to provide for an immersive spatial audio experience. Users can move their listening position on a visual map of the courtyard to engage with the sound texture from any position. They may also turn their virtual heads in the environment, the sonic effect of which is best perceived via headphones. Besides the listening position, the reference position and the positions of the sound sources can be relocated. This enables the listener not only to explore but also to recompose the work. Hence an aesthetic

experimental system is proposed allowing for testing ad hoc hypotheses about the work in a playful manner by reflection through experience. The two central compositional choices of the work—the introduction of a reference position and the use of a random sequence with repetition control—are exposed by offering the possibility to neutralise them. Enabling or disabling the reference position and switching between a fixed and an aleatoric sequence allows a direct experience of the aesthetic consequences of the artistic choices. This kind of creative analytical access to the work is particular to the web browser formulations of Zeitraum (Online and Diagram) and distinguishes a reformulation from a documentation of a work.3

1. Eckel, Gerhard. “The Choreography of Sound”. An arts-based research project funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund (PEEK AR 41). 2014. See http://cos. kug.ac.at (Accessed 201606-10.) 2. Eckel, Gerhard. “Zeitraum Formulations”. 2014. See https://www. researchcatalogue.net/ view/94547/141743 (Accessed 2016-06-10.) 3. Eckel, Gerhard. “Zeitraum Diagram. An interactive graphical formulation of Zeitraum”. 2014. See https:// www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/94547/113973 (Accessed 2016-06-10.)

To access the work go to: Eckel, Gerhard. Zeitraum Göteborg. Video walkthrough with binaural audio. 2015. URL: http://vimeo.com/gerhardeckel/ zeitraumgothenburg

Zeitraum Göteborg video walkthrough on Vimeo.

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Abstract Eighteen or 65 years old, 50 years of contributions, three months maternity leave, three-year degrees, 40 hours a week, eight hours a day, two-hour data downloads, 15 minutes away or five hours from the city. Time, in this context, does not only appoint the dissected measure of seconds, minutes or years but provides the syntaxes through which contemporary architecture and urbanism structure the specific spatio-temporalities of cities, buildings, inhabitants and their ways of living. Consequently, the increasing desynchronisation of space and an ongoing synchronisation of time are shaping a process that erodes the diversity of our lives and simultaneously expands the differences between those who can and cannot share the market velocity. In this article, the conflict of synchronicity will be made visible within contemporary cities through the notions of heterogeneity (chronopolitics), power (syncropolitics), repetition (rhythmpolitics) and speed (acceleratiopolitics) as an emerging field of action to be explored by architects, artists or designers.

The Conflict of Urban Synchronicity and its Heterotemporalities: Asynchronous Citizenship

Atxu Amann y Alcocer

Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez

Atxu Amann y Alcocer is an architect and urban planner, and has been Professor at Madrid School of Architecture since 1990. In 2009 she received the Educational Innovation Award from the Polytechnic University in Madrid because of her new pedagogies linked to experimental workshops including key issues of time, gender and action, with different urban actions generated and executed in public spaces in Madrid. Currently she is the organiser of the research group Hypermedia that develops projects to study and produce mappings of complexity focusing on space-time conflicts in urban environments and introducing gender and social considerations. Mother of four children, she reconciles her professional and personal tempos, making this visible as a gender and political action concerning time.

Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez became a chronopath a long time ago and always implements the temporal parameter in every project in which he is involved, whether it is artistic, architectural, pedagogical, sociological, political or urban. He is an architect from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, and received his Masters in Advanced Architectural Projects from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2012). His formal training was complemented at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2008) and with a Master in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University (2013) thanks to La Caixa scholarship to develop his PhD, entitled ChronoPolis, awarded in the national competition Arquímedes (2014) for young researchers of Spain, organised by the Ministry of Education and in the international competition Connecting Cities.

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Canadian traffic drone

Introduction What would happen if traffic lights would turn every seven minutes instead of one? Cars would possibly turn off their engines. Pedestrians would agglomerate on the pavement. The silence of the muted vehicles would be overshadowed by citizens’ conversations. Pavements should be wider to accommodate the waiting groups, and some benches might even be welcomed. Floor materials would become softer and smoother to let people sit and play. Flower beds would propagate near every intersection. Crossing jugglers would proliferate to entertain both drivers and pedestrians. Shops and markets would concentrate near these points and citizens would be able to get their daily purchases during these synchronic periods. One might have a spare key cut, or buy an aubergine for dinner’s moussaka. Of course, many people would turn to their smartphones to answer emails, read the newspaper or watch a piece of a TV show. Facade alignment could be set back and be more interactive with travellers. Buildings could occupy less space to let shared time have more of it. Building block dimensions could be reduced to increase public engagement. Edifice depth could be reconsidered in order to make space for trees to be planted to protect from both rain and sun. Perhaps cars would not need nor should have a speed limit exceeding 30 km/hour. Cabs, bicycles, cars, motorbikes or skates might share

their speed, have the same velocity. Perhaps the existence of traffic lights at every crossing would not be necessary. Zebra crossings might generate a civilised and synchronic agreement between parties, but they could mutate into the connective points of a continuous public space-time that would take up half of the city’s total surface area. If traffic lights only changed every seven minutes, this text could have been written on an iPad while seated in a grassy field waiting to cross to the other side, where someone would be there, at the agreed time, to have a coffee with you. What if urban services opened 24 hours, seven days a week? What if roads closed at midday? What if daily employment were for four hours only? What if maternity leave lasted 12 years? What if we had 100 holiday days a year? What if we worked three days a week? What if there were no weekend? What if car traffic was banned half of the week? What if half of the population were 70-year olds—retired—and the other half 17-year olds—underage? Temporal synchronisation determines most of the possibilities that lie within built environments and, simultaneously, forbids its alternative existence. In this article, the conflict of synchronicity will be made visible within contemporary cities through notions of heterogeneity—chronopolitics; power —syncropolitics; repetition—rhythmpolitics and speed—acceleratiopolitics—as an emerging field of action to be explored by architects, artists or designers. From this point of view, our actual synchronic system, mainly inherited from a capitalist and industrial organisation of space-time, is designed only to accommodate the temporality of motorised workmen, where urban environments have become perhaps the most sophisticated devices of time control. They guide citizens’ chronopolitics, where logistics means the channelling of speed and the management of time by moving people in space, leaving tempo as a leftover of this process.1 This simplification of multi-space design, by applying the same temporality in all of them, turns into the most

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infra-ordinary mode of power: “who decides the periods and rhythms? Who can place people under the pressure of time?”2 From operational legal framing3 to academic research,4 urban agents continue to project cities as exclusively spatial products.5 This process produces an increasing desynchronization of space—elite neighbourhoods and slums coexist side by side—and an ongoing synchronisation of time—workdays, opening times or energy usage—that erodes all differences and specificities of everyone’s lives. We all have to work eight hours a day, get our degree in three years, go shopping from ten to seven and wait one minute at the traffic light. But, in a world of a single urban temporal synchronicity, the question remains: what happens to “other” temporalities? Who can have control over their own time?

Aldo Van Eyck, “Playgrounds”, 1954.

Several agents from disparate fields have worked, and continue to work, on altering this status quo temporality, producing alternative possibilities that hold the potential to modify the different organisational structures within built environments and establish different political, sociological, cultural, artistic and architectural urbanities. For the purpose of this paper, we have labelled as “asynchronous citizenship” all those strategies that fight for alternative forms of urban synchronisation and that mitigate, consciously or not, against actual temporal dynamics within cities where most of their tactics are to subvert normative tempos in order to defend the urgent need for current human habitats6 to accommodate the emergent heterotemporalities7 of their inhabitants. In the following sections, we will

1. Virilio, P. Amanecer Crepuscular. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 2003. pp. 11-12. 2. Innerarity, Daniel. “Un mundo desincronizado”. Claves de la razón práctica. No. 186. 2008. pp. 12-16. Prisa Revistas. p. 13. 3. In the case of the urban legislation of Madrid from its first sentence—defining the community of Madrid as an “area of eight thousand and thirty square kilometres, located geographically in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula” (LDSCM, Preamble I)—to its last one—demarcating its “breach of the rules of distance” (LDSCM, Article 223)—is a spatial product. Ley del Suelo de la Comunidad de Madrid (LDSCM) Ley 9/2001, BOCM 17 July 2001. 4. From Vitruvius’ definition of architecture—as firmitas, utilitas and venustas (Vitruvius. Ten Books on Architecture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1999)—to Philipp Johnson’s one—as “the art of how to waste space” (New York Times interview, 27 December 1964)—every variable has been related to space. 5. Examining the definition of city as a “large town” (Oxford Dictionary, see: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/city (accessed 2015-10-14), as the “dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves” (Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University Chicago Press. 1958. p. 152.), as a “relatively and permanent human settlement” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/City (accessed 2016-07-26), as the “theatre of social life” (Mumford, Lewis. What is a City?. Architectural Record, 82. McGraw-Hill, Inc. November 1937. p. 185), as a “region with ubiquitous information technology” (Einman, E. and Paradiso, M. “When space shrinks—digital communities and ubiquitous society: Digital cities and urban life: A framework for international benchmarking”. Winter International Symposium on Information and Communication Technologies. Cape Town: Trinity College Dublin. 2004 or see: wikipedia http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_city (accessed 2009-04-28) or as “gigantic man-made object” (Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. New York, NY: The MIT Press. 1984. p. 29.), we are able to track its spatial production. 6. Urbanisation will have produced 27 megacities by 2025. By 2050, more than 70 per cent of the global population will live in cities and around 84-90 per cent of Europeans, North Americans, Australians and New Zealanders (UNDESA. World Population Prospects. New York, NY: United Nations. 2008). 7. Heterotemporality refers to the diverse and heterogeneous time needs of the multiple citizens that inhabit an urban environment, opposed to historical time as a model of temporal totality and alignment, but connected with Ricoeur’s notion of public/social time as the result of the overlapping of multiple time frames. See Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. I. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 1983.

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depart from Paul Virilio’s notion of chronopolitics to highlight the existence of a huge part of citizenship that is forced to assimilate homotemporal urbanity, while piercing this narrative with acts of citizens’ resistance against spatial politics that continue to divide neighbourhoods through distance to services and goods.

When analysing contemporary urbs, in an age of chronopolitics, “chronology is elevated over geography and pace over space”.16 Here, synchronicity can have a heterogeneous use across 24 hours, by varying the opening frequency of shops that are allowed to perform certain activities17 instead of others and an asymmetric intensity depending on the day of the week.18

Urban Chronopolitics: From Homo to Heterotemporality

Furthermore, time cannot be homogeneous and objective, but must be “understood as necessarily heterogeneous, intersubjective and political”.19 The imbalance comes from an existing, and ever alive, plurality of times20 in urban environments and an unavoidable synchronicity towards the one and only temporality of the heterospatial21 designed cities: the temporality of the male worker who has to use a car to get to his office. Every other time is discarded and forgotten: the time of old people, children, women, animals, youngsters, housekeepers, the unemployed, students, the disabled and so on.

Space has dominated the discourse around the polis.8 The friction comes from a citizenship that does not need to be in the same space, but at the same time. Urban events are not measured in the capacity to assist citizens but in the ability to connect with them.9 Old cities fixed to their territorialities mutate into hybrid urban environments, spatially freed but temporary entangled, forming an urbanity not only based on streets, buildings and squares but also connectivity, programming and coding. “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”10 Here is where chronopolitics appears through the need to reconcile everyone’s times in a common space that works in continuity: 24 hours of connection to upload and download videos, chat, work, buy, entertain or inform simultaneously.11 Any initiative can be developed in less than a day and become a media giant that goes through obsolete spatial barriers.12 Chronopolitics has been engaged with an interesting part of postcolonial literature located in the critical position where geopolitics has tended to conceptually reduce global politics to “a spatial spectacle”.13 Here the term is used to resist the subordination of geopolitics to space in Western intellectual thought and its simplifying idea of a linear time called progress.14 Because, ultimately, “othering” is always simultaneously geopolitical and chronopolitical.15

The simultaneous government of both space—by dividing it—and time—by homogenising it—constitutes a substantial element of social power;22 the “ideological and political hegemony in any society depends on an ability to control the material context of the personal and social experience.”23 This situation has generated an imbalance between both entities: “For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”24 Today, we are living in a digitalised world, where in 2015 IP networks transferred more than 7.3 petabytes every 5 minutes—the equivalent of all the movies ever made every 300 seconds; where Warcraft players count more than twice the population of Austria; where Facebook is the third most populated country in the world with over 500 million users; or where eBay is the largest market.25 Chronopolitics has to acknowledge a change in the arena of urban politics.26 Constructing a real and intermingled alternative to the “politics of

Atxu Amann y Alcocer and Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez

space”27 that has demonstrated itself as incapable of sustaining the Planet-Society and lays it out as an unsolvable problematic from its own nature, 28 an ecological crisis manifested itself through the deterioration of the environment.29 This is a Western crisis, because of unsustainable progress, a demographic crisis in its overpopulation, an urban crisis

that is contaminated and polluted, a rural crisis in its desertification, a political crisis for its incapacity of making viable decisions, a knowledge crisis that demonstrates fragmentation and lack of communication, and an ideological crisis that produces division and radicalisation devolving into anxiety and violence.

8. See Mumford, op.cit; Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Random House. 1961; Rowe, Colin. Ciudad Collage. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. 1981; Koolhaas, Rem. La Ciudad Genérica (The Generic City). Barcelona : Gustavo Gili. 2006; or Alexander, Christopher. “A city is not a tree”. Architecture Anthology. Vol. 122, No. 1. 1961. pp. 580-590.

19. Klinke, Ian. “Chronopolitics: A conceptual matrix”. Progress in Human Geography. Vol. 00. No. 0. 2012. pp. 1-18.

9. The 2010 World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands was the biggest online event with more than 10.3 million clicks every minute, and the 2014 World Cup was the most live-streamed event in history. 10. Foucault, Michel. “Of other spaces”. Diacritics. Vol. 16, No. 1. 1986. p. 22. 11. Chronopolitics is a term introduced first by Paul Virilio on his hypermodern texts about speed and war. It designates the relation between time perspectives to political decision-making, the relation between the control of time and the decisions adopted by a specific institution. In his essays Virilio joined the term chrono with geopolitics. In our case we extend its scope of action to form an entangled entity that cannot be separated from space. 12. On 14 July 2010, Old Spice launched the fastest growing online viral video campaign, gathering 6.7 million views within 24 hours and 23.2 million within 36 hours by building a bathroom set and allowing the actor to answer online questions instead of producing a TV ad.

20. From the biggest frames such as obsolescence time, universal time, historic time, circadian time or global time, passing through contracted time, self-time, family time, biographical time or interaction time to the small scale of body time, shared time, donated time, biological time, block time, real-time or mitotic time. 21. By heterospatiality we understand the diversified ways by which architects design built environments to accommodate spatial differences such as elite neighbourhoods—with its own kind of urban planning, infrastructures or legislations—dormitory towns, suburbs, industrial areas or rehousing neighbourhoods. 22. On 22 May 2014, the lawyer Michael Lewis filed the first-class action against HFT trading towards 13 US stock exchanges and their subsidiaries for not providing information that was timely or accurate and was not fairly distributed among the traders becoming the first trial on time distribution. Smith, Andrew. “What just happened”, The Guardian, 7 June 2014. See https://www. theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/07/inside-murky-world-high-frequencytrading (Accessed 2014-06-07.) 23. Harvey, David. La Condición de la Posmodernidad (The Condition of Postmodernity). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. 1998. p. 227.

13. Tuathail, Gearoid Ó. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1996. p. 60.

24. McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. London: Duckworth Overlook. 2011 (1951). p. 85.

14. Mamadouh, Virginie. “Reclaiming geopolitics: Geographers strike back”. Geopolitics. Vol. 4. No.1. 1999. pp. 118-138.

25. Citing the United Nations special rapporteur: “Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states.” La Rue, Frank. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. General Assembly 16 May 2011, Human Rights Council, Seventeenth session, Agenda item 3. United Nations.

15. Prozorov, Sergei. “The other as past and present: Beyond the logic of temporal othering in IR theory”. Review of International Studies. Vol. 37. No. 3. 2010. pp. 1273-1293. 16. Derian, John D. “The (s)pace of international relations: Simulation, surveillance, and speed”. International Studies Quarterly. Vol. 32. No. 3. 1990. pp. 295-310 (297). 17. On 30 June 2009, the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, declared: “Is it normal that on Sunday, when Mrs Obama wants to do some shopping in Paris with her daughters, I have to take my phone to get the shops to open? [...] We are going to change that.” See http://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/Actualite/ Delanoe-gele-les-ouvertures-le-dimanche-198430 (Accessed 2014-08-21.) 18. The debate around dominical rest visualises time as a socially constructed entity: leisure activities are also produced (and productive), although they are proclaimed free and even “free time”. Isn’t this freedom also a product? See Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum. 1992.

26. On 27 December 1999, in Jun (Granada, Spain) Internet access was declared a universal right for any citizen for the first time. This meant the birth of active teledemocracy. 27. Walker, Rob B.J. “International relations and the concept of the political”. In International Relations Theory Today. Oxford: Blackwell. 1995. pp. 306-327. 28. See Morín, Edgar. Seven complex lessons in education for the future. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. 1999. pp. 37-38. 29. The Global Footprint Network indicates 13 August 2013 as the day in the year that the earth reached its ecologic maximum budget: when our resource consumption is higher than the ability of the planet to replace them. In 1993 it was 21 October. See http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ (Accessed 2015-10-15.)

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Access door of the Veneta Wall in Bergamo, Italy.

Urban Syncropolitics: The Notion of Asynchronicity At exactly 10 o’clock, the bells inside the tower that dominates the Piazza Vecchia in the Northern Italian city of Bergamo used to ring 180 times. Its sound lasted precisely the 10 minutes it took to close the gates of the Veneta walls. When the sound started, every citizen hurried to climb the hill in order to access the city. After the last bell rang, whoever had not been able to reach the gates would spend the night extra-mural. Synchronicity has always fed any organisational system, independently of the fact that its structure fostered security, surveillance, power, production or control. Regarding urban environments, every city used to have its own time synchronisation based on mean solar time that was easily approximated with simple technology.30 It is remarkable that the first adoption of a standard time, and also the beginning of global synchronisation, was on 1 December 1847 in Great Britain, when railway companies used GMT to synchronise their stations. By 1855, 98 per cent of Great Britain’s public clocks were using it. Urban and territorial synchronicity, together with its social doppelganger, are fundamental features of standardised industrialisation systems and contemporary cities.31 If “motion is life”,32 flow should be controlled, redirected and synchronised.33 City is “a dwelling place organized by channels of commu-

nication and transportation […] Each crossing has its speed limits, its regulations, and its systematic enclosure and spaces within a system of societal organization.”34 Infrastructural planning has devoted a lot of effort to this task: the synchronisation of urban environment pushes users towards the temporality of the car worker.35 Every other time exudes from this labour time frame forming a one-way system—a socially constructed one36 — towards one of manufacture: the “production of money”.37 The synchronisation of urban heterotemporalities towards a unique and linear one has a huge impact on citizens’ lives and urban planning. Anyone aside from this homotemporal system is in a constant state of jammed sync that has to accommodate its own pace and tempo to that of the dominant urban organisation. Looking at gender temporalities within Madrid, we find that women perform 39% less movements for work than men—decreasing after marrying—where women mostly use public transport or walking while for men the private car dominates, where women move more than three times in activities related to house care than men, or where married women move closer to their place of residence than single people in a city whose urban planning fosters the “distancing of quotidian activities to the living quarters”.38 This is only part of an urban dilemma that produces a tremendous asynchrony between the different times of citizens and the decreasing amount of temporal possibilities that the city offers to them. The synchronic conflict has increased recently due to the exponential multiplication and visualisation of temporal alternatives.39 In this development, mass synchronisation has forgotten about the origin of temposcapes40 and their basic principles by which the fathers of the internet designed them using notions of free-flow communication—“information wants to be free”41—self-managed politics—“a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”42—low cost, uncensored counterculture, no commercialisa-

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tion, open software and the re-use of data. Today, updated temposcapes function as an asynchronous escape from spatial dominance providing the potential to explore alternative temporalities43 if data connection exists.44 Actual urban synchronisation appears to be unsustainable, maintaining both the old spatial borderlines—elite neighbourhoods, slums, congested areas, isolated suburbia, ecologically devastating developments; the old temporal barriers—reduced mobility for certain groups, different accessibilities, homotem30. Humans regulate their times according to different systems and political visions—mystic beliefs, production systems, natural cycles, war or urban mobility. Long before the 1884 International Meridian Conference—held in Washington DC—where the time of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (UK) was established as the standard—Greenwich Mean Time—countries with large maritime army needs such as Portugal or France had their own in sync models. 31. In a classical context, synchronisation (from Greek συ´ν: syn = the same, common and χρo´νoς: chronos = time) is the “coordination of events to operate a system in unison” (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization, (accessed 2015-10-05): occurring at the same time, agreeing with something else or remaining identical in more than one location. 32. Müller, Jorgen Peter. My system. London: Ewart, Seymour & Co. 1912. p. 9. 33. For an extension on this field, look at the work of Paul Virilio on speed and politics: Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 2006 [1977]; Stan Allen on infrastructures: Allen, Stan. “Infrastructural Urbanism”. In Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. 1999. pp. 48–57; or Manuel de Landa on history and engineering: Delanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. 1997. 34. Virilio, op cit. p. 6. 35. Cities as homochronous systems refers to the synchronisation between different traffic flows—roads, streets, motorways—in order not to clash with each other. Examples such as the construction of the M30 motorway in Madrid, with more than 43 kilometres underground and €7,000m investment, demonstrate the huge endowment of cities towards motorised synchronisation. 36. The actual day-night temporal organisation is under discussion as it is not only one through which human beings have organised themselves. The myth of the eight-hour sleep and the night as a continuous time for sleeping is debatable. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783. (Accessed 2015-10-15.) 37. Hülsmann, Jörg Guido. The Ethics of Money Production. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 2008. pp. x and 1. 38. García-Palomares, J.C and Gutiérrez Puebla, J. “Pautas de la Movilidad en el Área Metropolitana de Madrid”. Cuadernos de Geografía. Vol. 81-82. pp. 007-030.

poral synchronisation; and the new real-time ones— surveillance, tracking, access to information. Contemporary cities become duplicated and outpaced by time infrastructures that are faster, cheaper, more adaptive, complex and global in their synchronisation systems in an “informational society”45 that demands more complex synchronic systems that allow the asynchrony46 of its citizens, depending on their personal temporalities, the diachronic approach47 for urban studies, the same speed of connection and at different velocities, the ability of the system to allow mutations and work in real time, 39. Applications such as Tinder, Grindr, GeoCaching or Urban Curiosity. Video games such as DayZ, SimCity, Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft. Interactive movies such as Johnny Rock or Freedom Fighter. Design software such as Grasshopper or Karamba. 40. Temposcapes designate the environments that are not based in spatial conditions but mainly in temporal ones. Contexts include the World Wide Web, the technologies of communication or virtual platforms. 41. Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic: A radical approach to the philosophy of business. New York, NY: Random House. 2001. p. 95. 42. Barlow, John Perry. “Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)”. 9 February 1996. Obtained from https://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/ barlow_0296.declaration. (Accessed 2016-07-28.) 43. The Internet has helped to form communities not based on distance—neighbours—but on common interests: music, political views, subcultures, fashion, hobbies, etc. 44. Nowadays, global internet usage or the right to Internet access is an important matter of discussion that will not be explored here. 45. Manuel Castells offers this term opposed to the information society emphasising the attribution of a specific form of social organisation in the generation, processing and transmission of information. Castells, Manuel. La Era de la Información: Economía, sociedad y cultura. Vol. 1 México siglo XXI. 1999. p.47. 46. Asynchrony here has to be understood as the ability of not having to be completely synchronised with the system in order to make the most of it; to have the ability of connecting at any time. Examples such as asynchronous learning, which uses online learning resources to facilitate information sharing among a network of people, or collaborative editing, which produces work through individual contributions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_learning. (Accessed 2016-07-26.) 47. Diachronic linguistics is the study of language at different periods in history as it changes opposed to synchronic linguistics which studies language at a single historical period of time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diachronic (Accessed 2016-07-26.) The first model argues for a dynamic system where change and movement are the main focus.

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the simultaneity of actions and its asymmetric uses or the instant availability and freedom of use. The diffusion and development of this technologic system has changed the material base of our lives, and therefore life itself, in every aspect: in how we produce, how and in what we work, how and what we consume, how we are educated, how we inform and entertain, how we sell, how we bankrupt, how we govern, how we make war and peace, how we born and die, who is in command, who is enriched, who exploits others, who suffers and who is marginalized.48 With its own legislations and protocols the need for a new urban (a)synchronic system is urgent; an organisation that takes account of its citizen’s timings and accommodates changes to itself.49

Urban Rhythmpolitics: Disconnected Paces In 1931, the philosopher Lucio Pinheiro dos Santos sent a piece of his unpublished essay entitled “Rhythmanalysis” to the French intellectual Gaston Bachelard. Both that article and the whole research project was lost in a process in which no editor wanted to publish it, ending in the late 1950s when his widow burnt the manuscript in front of the offices of the Imprensa Nacional. Today, we know about Pinheiro dos Santos’ work, also called the “ghost philosopher”, as a result of the effect he had on the work of Bachelard, and, later, on Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who posits rhythm as the key element in cities, which presupposes the “unity of time and space: an alliance”.50 Using Pinheiro’s home city—São Paulo—as an example of rhythmic activity, we found that Paulistanos felt the consequences of urban spatial politics; spending 46 minutes travelling to their job daily, reaching 150 hours each year, being interrupted by events such as public demonstrations on

Paulista Avenue that modify this rhythm between one and two hours every two days. The work of urban agents only frame São Paulo in certain ways: the average of seven million vehicles moving daily, for instance, trying to sync with more than 15,000 buses, with a weekend peak-time threshold from 11am to 1pm that usually generates traffic jams of a total of 100km. This statistic and scientific data is, perhaps, the greatest of all fictions, making us believe that by acknowledging them we will know the one and truthful reality of “Sampa”. We have all heard of that city described by the static urbanity of statistical data, the mapped city of the averages or the immutable city that has no time, but is continuously enacted through visual reality. Urban environments are not defined by their apparently unchangeable materiality—objects, architecture and structures—but mainly characterised by its citizens’ flows. Urbanity depends on the rhythms of the city—on its tempo—that are plural, diverse, often colliding and asynchronous. “Although each of us knows that on Earth all the seasons of the year, all climates, and all hours of the day and night exist together at every moment, we generally do not think about it.”51 When confronting the idea of a temporary and spatially divided city in pieces of commerce, leisure, bureaucracy or residence to the simultaneous 24-hour society brought about by global time connectivity, the problems of a citizenship that is not synchronised towards the car-driving workers’ temporality, become visible. The 24-hour opening times of gyms, food shops, restaurants, libraries or childcare services becomes a symptom of a growing part of the citizens that use forgotten time frames. Legislation has even been adapted to meet these needs, as in the case of Melbourne, Australia, with its 24-Hour City Policy that “does not seek to create an environment that supports continuous, high-level activities throughout the entire day and night. The policy recognises that the city progresses through different rhythms over the course of 24 hours.”52

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Urban planners need to acknowledge citizens’ temporalities and act accordingly, not just in legislative terms, but also in their profession—its strategies and tactics. “If we attend to the size of a city, we will discover that it is not the space that defines its size but that it is time. Time is responsible for the possibilities that I have to cover a territory within twenty-four hours and those possibilities depend on our technical means”.53 And from a citizen’s point of view it is also about cultural temporalities: of the top ten most nocturnal cities in the world, six were in Spain—Malaga, Zaragoza, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. Contemporary citizenship synchronisation seems to be tending to a continuous spatio-temporal envelope in which every instant seems to have the same importance, despite its different intensity in contrast to the current urban dissection through time frames. One of these time frames, the labour rhythm, has produced fruitful research and practice in the artistic field, producing critiques of the eight-hour working day. This symmetrical rhythm was devised by the eight-hour movement in the UK, led by Robert Owen (1833), campaigning for “eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”. It cost many years for workers to achieve54 this work-life balance during the industrial revolution, as Owen wrote: “eight hours daily labour is enough for any human being, and under proper arrangements sufficient to afford an ample supply of food, raiment and shelter or the nec-

Eight hour work movement, Movimiento 888, Reino Unido 1843.

48. Castells, Manuel. “La sociedad de la información” (The Information Society). El Pais. 25 February 1995. pp. 50-52. 49. Double-ended synchronisation, Phase-locked loops, Synchronization Rights, Time Protocol or Time Synchronization Function (TSF) are all entries on Wikipedia (Accessed 2015-08-13.) 50. Lefebvre, op. cit. p. 60. 51. Lem, Stanislaw. One Human Minute. London: J. Johnson and S. Johnson Moon Publishers. 1986. p. 5. 52. Community Service Committee Report. City of Melbourne’s Policy for the 24 Hour City. Policy, Melbourne. Agenda Item 5.3. 9 September 2008. City of Melbourne Council. 53. Saènz de Oiza, Francisco Javier. “Creadores de hoy”. 24 December 2010. Obtained from Radio-Televisión Española at http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/creadores/creadores-hoyfrancisco-javier-saenz-oiza/973318/ (Accessed 2016-07-28.) 54. In 1856, workers even built the Monument to the Eight Hour Day opposite to the Trades Hall in Melbourne (Australia).

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essaries and comforts of life, and for the remainder of his time, every person is entitled to education, recreation and sleep.”55 From performances such as Secret Strikes by Alicia Framis56, to video projects like Workers Leaving the Factory by Harun Farocki57, through exhibitions such as “Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life”58, the synchronicity system of urban labour has been a field of exploration. Ultimately, the urban environment and its synchronisation is the result of the fastest rhythms—related to production, power and consumption—and cannot accommodate the slower ones; the “others”. It is in this context where “slow” movements emerge, not as utopian or retrograde demands, but with the intention to reconcile everyone’s temporalities through claiming that urban rhythms should be based on the weakest, slowest inhabitants.59 Uniquely, during so-called “states of exception”, urban environments abandon their routine rhythms and establish a synchronisation based on different variables such as protests, carnivals, cultural events or parades.60 Citizens in a constant rhythm of mutation coexist with frozen urban processes, provoking a tremendous asynchronised urbanity that is not entirely dynamic or static but entangled. The need of an old mass rhythm towards the durational and extensive time of the motorised worker disappeared when the real-time technologies introduced an (a) synchronicity that allowed each citizen to choose their own temporality, including its resistance.61

Urban Acceleratiopolitics: Real-Time Synchronisation During the last decades, time has become what natural resources were in preceding epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second.62

The systems of measuring—aka imposing—time are as countless as their precisions: calendars, time zones, clocks and any other kind of timekeeping device—pendulums, chronometers, clepsydras, sundials or obelisks. Different devices, but the same kind of time: the linear system of the second.63 In this system, time is more developed and accurately measured—0.000 000 000 000 001s—than any other entity in the world and the second has become entangled in relations the metre was in before: of power, sovereignty, control and politics. “Time must never be thought of as pre-existing in any sense; it is a manufactured quantity.”64 When status-quo agencies start to realise that synchronisation is just a fiction, they start to take advantage of it by setting up rules in which arriving at a specific time decides who wins and who loses.65 If you can measure with more precision and calculate with more accuracy, you become the reference point of synchronisation.66 As Paul Virilio puts it: “if time is money, as they say, then speed is power.”67 Some of these synchronicities are entangled in an emergent field called accelerationism,68 which diagnoses the present context as the destruction of long term thinking: “in this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.”69 On the radical edge of this synchronisation, we find smart cities based on the promise of business growth and knowledge sharing that will be accomplished by efficient management, integrated ICT and active citizen participation. Their temporal synchronisation is again reduced to a simplistic but accelerated version: a unique temporality for their citizens towards the hunt of money production and with the bonus reward of wireless connection.70 “Improvement of citizen everyday life in the city for instance can mean the simplification of citizen transportation, the access to city resources or the opportunities for employment and local growth.”71 For a market opportunity of US$1.5 trillion,72 most

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of these cities are ground-zero master-planned over greenfield or depopulated sites, where any trace of innovative urban planning is nonexistent, forcing citizens to inhabit the same spatial urban morphology of the past, but, at the same time, live at the rhythm of the immediate real-time logic. Again, the city of the future is based on distances and areas of fragmented use, avoiding the fracture between a temporal citizenship and an immutable architecture that hosts it as the main conflict in urban environments “because at the same time society is a technological and medical feat, and

marginalizes broad population sectors that are irrelevant to the new system […] what should be laid out is how to rebalance our four-star technological development and our social underdevelopment.” 73 As Michel Feher puts it, the neoliberal condition has compressed the world into the near future, not allowing us to plan through different temporalities producing only “one second spectacle architectures”—Gehry’s Guggenheim (Bilbao), Calatrava’s Culture City (Valencia) or the entire Dubai’s new architectures.

55. Owen, Robert. “Foundation Axioms of Society for Promoting National Regeneration in ‘Man vs Machine’”. Morning Chronicle. 7 December 1833. p. 3.

Clock by Prisonsucks.com—2,183,523 people in US prisons and jails today. See http://www.prisonpolicy.org/clocksource.html. (Accessed 2015-10-02.)

56. For example, Alicia Framis´ Secret Strike at the Tate Modern in 2006 (See: http://aliciaframis.com.mialias.net/2006-2/secret-striketate-modern-2006/ (Accessed 2015-10-07). For the original video, see: https://vimeo. com/103331198 (Accessed 2015-10-07.)

66. On 15 September 2008, George W. Bush gave a talk on the fall of Lehman Brothers with the financial market disciplining him in real time with every word he said that led to a paralysis in the construction of new community colleges, schools or community clinics. See: http://www.nytimes. com/2008/09/24/business/economy/24text-bush.html. (Accessed 2015-01-13.)

57. For example, see: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/ workers-leaving-factory-eleven-decades. (Accessed 2015-09-24.) For the video, see: https://vimeo.com/59338090 (Accessed 2015-09-24.) 58. See: http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/time-motion-redefining-working-life/. (Accessed 2015-08-15.) 59. See http://www.slowmovement.com/ (Accessed 2015-09-22.) 60. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. London: The University of Chicago Press. 2005. Especially Chapter One: The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government. pp. 12-43. 61. The tumblr blog Vaginas of the World is an action of online synchronisation that reinstates old-school feminist activist practices arranging meetings in a specific place where to look at their own genitals censored by medical and social conventions. 62. See “A Matter of Time”. Scientific American, New York, NY: Scientific American Inc. 2006. 63. Whose very definition has reached its atomic stage being “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.” See: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/second.html. (Accessed 2015-09-27.) 64. “A Matter of Time”, Scientific American. 2006. p. 21. 65. It is also used to intensify social claims: the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Surveillance Society Clock by the American Civil Liberties Union, the World POP Clock by the Census Bureau, the Earth Clock by Wisdom Academy, the AIDS Clock by UNFPA, the Military Spending Clock, the Drug War Clock, the National Debt Clock or the Incarceration

67. Armitage, John. Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond. Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 16. pp. 25-55. p.36. 68. Despite all polemics around the notion, its definition could be the idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain techno-social processes that historically characterised it, should be expanded and accelerated in order to generate radical social change. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism (Accessed 2016-07-26.) 69. Williams, Alex and Srnicek, Nick. “ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics”. Critical Legal Thinking. 5 February 2013. See: http:// criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/. (Accessed 2015-09-29.) 70. Only provided free of charge as method for being connected 24/7 and synchronised for business opportunities. 71. Anthopoulos, Leonidas and Fitsilis, Panos. “From Digital to Ubiquitous Cities: Defining a Common Architecture for Urban Development”. Intelligent Environments (IE), Sixth International Conference. Kuala Lumpur: IEEE. 2010. pp. 301-306. 72. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarwantsingh/2014/06/19/smart-cities-a1-5-trillion-market-opportunity/ (Accessed 2015-07-10.) 73. Castells, Manuel. La sociedad de la información. El Pais Newspaper. 25th February 1995. pp. 50-52. See online article: http://elpais.com/diario/1995/02/25/opinion/793666808_850215.html. (Accessed 2015-07-10.) My translation.

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Indignados at Puerta del Sol, 2011. Image courtesy of Left Flank.

Activism is often an urban and architectural moment, and, again, cities become the ground were Indignados at Puerta del Sol (2011) to some of its politics while at the same time reappropriating its technological possibilities. The 15M as the major demonstration and success of the Spanish Indignados movement was developed in public space, occupying the streets and square of Sol (Madrid) for more than twenty days. From the very beginning of the camp site (16 May 2011), real time was used as a weapon through social networks by synchronising people through hashtags such as #spanishrevolution, #democraciarealya— real democracy now—#nonosvamos—we are not leaving—#15M, #juntaelectoralfacts or #noten-

emosmiedo —we are not afraid—to transport food and drink, to inform about meetings, public assemblies, technical needs or to move from one place to another to fend off the baton charges, synchronising flows of people and protest, using speed to challenge the status quo and displaying an unprecedented precision and accuracy in their achievement of goals. John Posthill speaks about the importance of techno-political knowledge for a real activist action where real-time synchronisation is visualised and used.74 After the dismantling of the campsite, several real-time synchronisations of the movement continued: 15MpaRato –virtual platform to denounce corrupted actions and sue politicians— DemocraciaRealYa—the hashtag became a blog for

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synchronising the protests—or Partido X—a political party where candidates and policies are decided on online. Time cultures reflect their society’s values, developing what Edward T. Hall called the “silent language” of the rules of social time, where there is no distinction between domestic and urban contexts, between transport and work activities or between home, neighbourhood, square and city. The actions are maintained, the way we carry them out and their synchronisation is what has changed. These conditions alter the spatial context where it happens: domestic and public activities could happen in the same space (Change75 or Partido X76), but also the innocent and the perverted (Grindr77 or Tinder78), the near and the distant (Flightradar2479 or Tasker80), the visual and the informational (Polluted Air81) or the digital and the real (Root Explorer82 or Sleep83). Things not only happen in a specific time and space, but also at the same time. Contemporary cities need to confront this dilemma where their inhabitants tend to change at accelerating velocities and they at the same time are designed to set out stable systems towards a social cohesion that no longer endures. “While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’. In a sense, solids cancel time; for liquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that matters.”84

Conclusions: Asynchronous Citizenship Synchronisation has embedded itself into the mechanisms of society, both in its forms of control and resistance, and, ultimately, in the ways we live. The question of who decides on our times remains the vital critical question. Every citizen is forced to live at the rhythm of the motorised worker, while alternative temporalities are disregarded in an entangled urbanity in which inhabitants demand a complex system of synchronisation of every mode of living, rather than the existing simplistic version. Nowadays, urban borders are created by speed and crossed by acceleration. The need to reflect on its synchronisation becomes a crucial aspect in how to improve the ecosystems that we inhabit. The difference is made through transit speed, where a techno elite is synchronised in a real-time world, arriving everywhere first—together with its capital and properties—while the rest of the population is either offline—has no access at all—or slowed down—is without technology. Moreover, this conflict becomes radicalised in urban environments, where we are forced to inhabit the old spaces of architecture and, at the same time, live at the rhythm of the new immediate time logic. We are asked to respond and be synchronised in real time. Today, this global sync model moves through cities and ends up with the reinforcement of already established powers even after activists’ attempts to reappropriate them. This synchronic logic has overtaken space, becoming the main battle field

74. Postill, John. “Hacker, lawyer, journalist, spy: the field dynamics of technopolitical expertise in Spain’s new protest movement, 2010-2014”. Launch of media ethnography group, Goldsmiths College, 21 January 2014, London. 75. See: https://www. change.org/ (Accessed 201509-06.) 76. See: https://partidox.org/ (Accessed 2015-09-06.) 77. See: http://www.grindr. com/ (Accessed 2015-0906.) 78. See: http://www. gotinder.com/ (Accessed 2015-09-06.) 79. See: http://www.flightradar24.com/ (Accessed 2015-09-06.) 80. See: http://tasker. dinglisch.net/ (Accessed 2015-09-06.) 81. See: http://aqicn.org/ map/world/#@g/40.1397/3.3641/7z (Accessed 201509-06.) 82. See: https://play. google.com/store/apps/ details?id=com.speedsoftware.rootexplorer&hl=en (Accessed 2015-09-06.) 83. See: http://sleepgenius. com/ (Accessed 2015-0906.) 84. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. 2000. p. 2.

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85. Massey, Doreen. Space, place and gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. p. 4. 86. Virginia Woolf quoted in: Zafra, Remedios. A Connected Room of One’s Own. Madrid: Fórcola. 2010. p. 10. 87. De Kerckhove, Derrick. Design Renaissance: Selected Papers from the International Design Conference, Glasgow. Salisbury: Open Eye. 1994. p. 156.

where the struggles for power, sovereignty and dominance are played out. Its reasoning has extended, through atomic technology, to every human sphere: transport (digital data), domesticity (augmented home), labour (telework), economy (algorithmic trading), health (time cultures), access (bandwidth), learning (open access information), or communication (immediate availability). Urban environments have become the most radicalised and visible scenario of these conflicts, in which different agents are claiming the need to control their own time. Urban synchronicity has trespassed the “geometry of power”,85 moving towards a “heterochronia of power” where the question changes from what kind of mobility we have to whether we have control over it or not. After the utopian optimism of the start of the World Wide Web, in addition to the legacy of cyberpunk that emphasised the possibility of “not repeating” the offline world in the new online one, we have ended up

in a totalitarian synchronised ecosystem of highly sophisticated technologies. The study of urban synchronicity visualises the agents at play, the dynamics that are substituted and the new imposed ones, the new ways of control, their asymmetries, the ways of resistance, their quotidian hidden agenda and, ultimately, it provides a critical exposé of how we live and why we live like it in order to engage with it through committed interventions. The prevalence and growth of synchronic infrastructures that work online is building an uneven world in which, as several intellectuals have claimed, the concept of exclusion that we used to express in spatial terms, should be reformulated into temporal ones. Today, the new strangers are not the ones who live far away but the ones who live literally in another time. The temporal asynchronisation that is imposed upon us does not allow a coordination of life with the space in which it is lived and thus engenders new forms of struggle and

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domination. Sovereignty is enacted through urban practices and its spatial doppelgangers. Cyberspaces coexist and melt with Stone Age spaces, resulting in a tremendous asynchronised world that is not a single ecosystem but an entangled one: “I am rooted, but I flow”.86 We live in the same bedrooms as our ancestors but we develop completely different activities —voyeurism, public speech, work, leisure or learning. The fight against homotemporal urban synchronisation is being fought across many disciplines through multiple technical means and, also, in many fields. “Asynchronous citizenship” shares the demand to set up an ecosystem for human beings—in some cases all living beings—capable of taking account of its citizens’ heterotemporalities to propose a complex urban environment where the challenge is to use time, everyone’s time, to perform a synchronisation of the plurality of times as the basis for a more dignified, fair and equitable society without difference of gender, capacities—physical, economic or cultural. This article aimed to outline the urban synchronisation controversies and the agents at play by unveiling a conflictive arena that remains silent, in

order to ignite a productive debate about the organisation of action in a field of crucial importance for citizenship: its habitat. Twenty-three years have passed since Derek De Kerckhove noted that it “is to designers and artists that more and more people will turn to ask for an intelligible and liveable technological environment; it is designers and artists who they will ask to be comprehensive in their approach to reality”, and urban environments assume most of it.87

Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, London.

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Abstract Literally translated, the Indonesian word nongkrong approximates “squatting by the side of the road with a cigarette” or “sitting around because you’re not doing any work”. Though it is tempting to judge such activity as a waste of time, the process of nongkrong (essentially, non-productive social time) actually serves a very important role in building social relationships in Indonesia. It describes the act of hanging out, of bodies leaning into space together, of social, mutual space and slow time. Nongkrong is the hum of relationships, an activity that through its ubiquity, especially in Java, acts as social “glue”. Within the contemporary arts circuit in Yogyakarta, Java, an incredible proliferation of artist collectives and collaborations support the vast number of young and emerging artists. For many of Yogya’s artists, nongkrong is an essential aspect of how both their art practices and communities function and flourish. In the words of one such artist, “Nongkrong is our school”. Its looseness allows for an open and generous exchange of ideas and information, a casual knowledge-sharing that many artists claim is more influential on their development than their educations in school. Rather than focusing on end-product productivity, nongkrong offers a holistic view of art as a long-term social process. Taking the Indonesian concept of nongkrong as its pivot point, this paper extends the idea outwards from its specific locality to think through the importance of such non-productive social time in the broader contemporary arts. I draw on the work of a number of scholars and theorists, most particularly Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, who conceptualise “study” as an informal social process and collective intellectual practice. I contend that the casual hanging out entailed in nongkrong supports collaboration and defines what is at once a representative thread of contemporaneity in art worldwide at this historical moment, and a peculiarly and vibrantly Indonesian form of collective practice.

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Nongkrong and Non-Productive Time in Yogyakartaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Contemporary Arts Sonja Dahl Sonja Dahl is an independent artist and researcher with a fluid, travelling, and collaboration-focused practice. She is a member of several ongoing collaborative projects including Craft Mystery Cult (US) and The Poetic Everyman Project (Indonesia and Australia). Her 2012-2014 research projects in Indonesia, supported by the Fulbright Foundation and Asian Cultural Council, focused on the culture of collaboration, artist collectives, and participatory projects in Yogyakarta, Javaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contemporary arts, as well as in-depth study of textile and

indigo dye production in Java, Bali, Sumba, and Flores. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2012. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at Bezirksmuseum Neubau, Vienna; The Darwin Visual Arts Association, Darwin NT; and The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR. Her writing is published with Carets and Sticks Contemporary Arts online, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Dilettante.

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Introduction: The What/ Why/How of Nongkrong “Nongkrong is an existential process.” 1

1. From an informal conversation with Idaman Andarmosoko at IVAA (Indonesian Visual Arts Archive) in March 2014. 2. Yogyakarta is a city located in Central Java. The name is pronounced and spelled in its more informal form as Jogjakarta. Also referred to most frequently in short form as Yogya or Jogja. 3. From an informal conversation with Gintani Nur Apresia Swastika at Acehouse Collective in March 2014.

This statement, delivered both playfully and seriously by an acquaintance of mine in Yogyakarta’s art scene, has become something of a beacon in navigating and understanding the social process of nongkrong.2 At surface level nongkrong— an Indonesian term meaning, essentially, “hanging out”—seems an unlikely activity to spark philosophical mining of the depths of human existence. I’ve been told that in literal translation the word nongkrong approximates “squatting by the side of the road with a cigarette” or “sitting around because you’re not doing any work”. In this unexpected equation of existential philosophy and hanging out, intellect appears easily embodied, almost shrugged on. In such a situation, questions about the unfathomable nature of being itself could arise slowly, mysteriously, and hover in the mind for the duration of a cigarette, maybe two, then dissipate like smoke. As my friend went on to explain, if you are feeling deeply and existentially alone, you can always nongkrong with friends to lift your spirits. For many of Yogyakarta’s artists, nongkrong is an essential aspect of how both their art practices and communities function and flourish. In the city’s many art spaces groups of friends cluster amoebalike, around overflowing ashtrays, coffee cups, and plates of fried snacks. They sit, lean, or lounge at various angles, getting up to wander about and return in a fluid orbit. Yogya’s inexpensive rents and relaxed pace of life make such collectivism possible on a practical level, and distinguishes its

contemporary arts scene from those of other prominent centres for the arts in Indonesia, such as Bandung and Jakarta. Known as “the city of students”, Yogya is both a nucleus for creative and intellectual pursuits and a syncretic hub for a hybrid mix of traditional Javanese culture and contemporary popular culture. Yet for all its diversity, Yogya upholds its reputation as Java’s quintessential “slow city”. Coming, as I do, from an American context, I am trained to speak about time in market terms. “Time is Money”, as we say, something that can be spent or wasted, but above all should be productive. This hyper-capitalist valuation of time muddles an understanding of how nongkrong functions. At surface level this constant hanging around may appear incredibly unproductive. However, I have come to understand that nongkrong as it is practised among Yogya’s artists, intellectuals and activists is actually a profoundly productive and creative practice that functions without overt regard to the capitalist model. Thus, I have come to think of it as more akin to “non-productive time”—neither overtly goal-driven, nor unproductive in the capitalist sense. Rather than focusing on end-product productivity, nongkrong offers a holistic view of art as a long-term social process. It is a site of potential action, a social space that is all about the pleasures of sharing time with friends. Through many nongkrong sessions with Yogya’s artists, curators, gallerists, intellectuals and researchers, I have come to recognise that what marks the city’s distinctive personality within Indonesia’s contemporary arts is exactly this emphasis on the relational and intersub-

Sonja Dahl

jective sociality at the heart of artists’ practices there. The social phenomenon of hanging out without the explicit aim of being productive in any particular fashion supports collaboration in Yogya and exemplifies what is, I believe, at once a representative thread of contemporaneity in art worldwide at this historical moment, and a specifically Indonesian form of collective practice. This paper explores various aspects of the lived and philosophical experiences of nongkrong and also extends it conceptually outwards from its specific locality to think through the importance of such non-productive social time in the broader worldwide contemporary arts and cultures.

A Temporary Landing Place In terms of etymology, the word nongkrong itself has multiple meanings and functions. It is related to a body position (squatting), a social act (hanging out with a group of people), and a particularly transient relationship to time. The term angkring, like nongkrong, also correlates with a body position—that of a seated person with one leg drawn up on the bench and an arm slung over their bent knee. Angkring itself means “a temporary landing place”, like birds on a wire who alight for a while, then move on again. This is the root word for angkringan, the ubiquitous mobile food and coffee vendors who roll their carts out every morning and evening across Yogyakarta, find a good spot to set up then unfold the tarpaulin roofs, set out benches and fire up their gas-powered stove on which water for coffee and tea are boiled. These temporary landing places themselves then play host to any number of clients throughout the day and night who wish to come, take a spot on the bench, have a snack, some coffee, and chat with whoever happens to be there. While today there are also cafes and malls and convenience stores that all play host to friends in need of a hangout, the angkringan are the historically favoured tongkrongan (locations for nongkrong). They continue to proliferate in Yogyakarta as they are simultaneously being forced out of style in other major cities such as Jakarta, where the government’s

“normalisation” programme has declared angkringan and other street-side vending to be interruptions to the city’s constantly thwarted attempts at streamlining and modernising. In early 2014, the recently minted artist collective Acehouse launched the opening of its new headquarters with a huge party. At the opening, several of its members admitted to me that while they obtained the building so that they could host exhibits and other projects, the primary reasoning to rent a house lay in their desire to have a more permanent space for all-hours nongkrong. A number of practitioners in Yogya have explained to me that in order to become a “serious” collective, a group of friends must obtain a house to headquarter in. But in the case of Acehouse, something sentimental was sacrificed in this move. One of their members, Gintani, told me the story of their origins. Like so many other collective efforts, Acehouse began as a group of friends who regularly spent time hanging out together. Every afternoon whoever was free would gather at the angkringan set up purposely in front of the home of one of their primary members. They would drink sweet coffee, eat some fried snacks or nasi kucing, and chat about the current goings-on in the art scene. Every afternoon they would spend at least a couple of hours engaged in these nongkrong sessions, then break for their afternoon showers and re-congregate at whatever openings or events were happening that evening. The next day, while engaged in nongkrong, they would share their impressions of the previous evening’s events. In this way they gradually decided to make a collaboration themselves, planning it out casually during their hangout sessions at the angkringan. After they had made a name for themselves, and their collaborative project, Realis Tekno Museum (itself basically an ode to hanging out) had made an appearance in the 2013 Jakarta Biennale, they decided it was time to “get serious” and rent a house. Gintani recalled their angkringan days wistfully and with some regret that their new space meant an abandonment of their favorite angkringan guy, who was now forced to seek out a new location and new clientele.3

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Both nongkrong and angkring offer relationships to time typified by such spontaneous, open-ended, temporary encounters as those enjoyed by Acehouse at both their current tongkrongan/ headquarters and at their old favourite angkringan. These kinds of encounters glue the Yogyakarta art scene together in many fundamental ways. They allow for the exchange of both conversations and those interactions that are more subtle, based upon energy and feeling between people. In artist nongkrongs especially, this indescribable essence of the hangout is also a locus of potential creative energy from which ideas and projects may—or may not—flow.

A Gift Economy of Time 4. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. New York, NY: Vintage. 1979. p. xx. 5. Ibid., p. 105. 6. Syafiatudina, as quoted in “KUNCI. Toilet tissue and other formless organization matters”. Open engagement in conversation: Place and revolution. See http://openengagement.info/tag/kunci/ (Accessed 2015-08-06.) 7. From an interview with Syafiatudina at Kedai Kebun Forum, 3 March 2014. 8. From an informal conversation with Bayu Widodo at Survive Garage, February 2014. 9. Juliastuti, Nuraini, “After the house has gone”. In Agung Nugroho Widhi (ed.) Stories of a space. Yogyakarta: Indo Art Now. 2015. pp. 260-272.

In the Indonesian language there is a term used for spending time that serves as an analogy for this. Makan waktu literally translates as “eating time”. Extending the metaphor, if we are eating time with a large group of friends this creates a feast situation. To feast on time offers a pleasurable foil to the ever-concerning notion of wasting time or being unproductive. A feast situation feeds and sustains, nourishes and relaxes. Similar to caloric intake, a feast of time can provide very life-sustaining energy for the work yet to be done. It is time that functions through generosity and affection. In his visionary book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde maintains that art, as an agent of transformation, operates within a gift economy. He describes such economy in this way: “Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the

parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.”4 Hyde’s emphasis on generosity in the making and circulation of art places creative work in an economy based upon relationships and non-market exchange. Essentially, he equates creativity with generosity. If we are to follow this train of thought, then the ways in which art is made and creative relationships are sustained must ideally support and derive from such generosity. Hyde cautions that if we nonetheless allow our ideas and the relationships that foster them to operate as commodities, this establishes a boundary, “so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee.”5 The gift essence must be kept in motion, kept alive and shared in order to avoid such a fate. Within Yogyakarta’s contemporary arts a parallel tension exists between economies of time based upon personal professionalisation and collaboration. In a 2015 round-table discussion about their international research project Made in Commons, members of KUNCI Cultural Studies Collective met with members of several other Indonesian and European collectives. During the conversation KUNCI’s members spoke at length about the process of creating and sustaining their collective and the role of interdependence and democratic sharing of tasks therein. Syafiatudina (Dina) addressed both the importance of such inter-reliance and ways in which she perceives such social dynamics are shifting in Yogya: One of the changes in the arts and cultural landscape in Yogya is that it

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is becoming more and more professionalised and the professionalism can overturn friendship, it is becoming more competitive… This kind of competition can make you feel quite excluded or lonely, so [I keep thinking] who is my ally and who can I work with? The nature of friendship is also changing amongst most cultural practitioners in Yogya, so for me to have more KUNCI members is to have more allies… a working network.6 In conversation with me in 2014, Dina described some of the challenges KUNCI had been facing as its members were travelling for research, study, and residency programmes more frequently. She missed the old days when they always used to hang out together in their collective house, working and talking and sharing space. According to Dina, nongkrong is an important process through which both trust and affection are built among a group of people. By hanging out together people can get a feel for each other and how they relate both socially and professionally.7 Bayu Widodo, founder of Survive Garage, Yogya’s alternative art space focused specifically on supporting young and emerging artists, expressed similar concerns to me about the effect of boom times in the art market. He told me he worries that when the art market is strong, or there is too much focus on selling artwork (as he feels there is now), that the variety and quality of artists’ work will suffer as well. People try only to make work that is trendy or sellable. Responding to such concerns, Bayu created a system of expectations for the young artists who show there, including regular conversations in the form of nongkrong through which they learn to talk about their work, their ideas, and the reasons they choose to do what they do in their projects. These nongkrong sessions set up a mentorship relationship, a web of support. Accordingly, many people drop in to chat at Survive Garage, so Bayu’s schedule is filled with a lot of spontaneous nongkrong. When

people stop by to hang out he feels obliged to drop what he’s doing and spend the time with them, describing this as a role of hospitality and something he finds pleasurable in spite of the interruptions to his own work.8 Such spirit of generosity with personal time is indeed one of the most compelling and pervasive characteristics that ties together Yogya’s sprawling arts communities.

On Being Alternative The particularly non-productive time that characterises artist nongkrongs in Yogya also distinguishes them from the ultra-productive, CV-loading and so-called “professionalised” track that highly capitalist systems encourage from artists. Of course, this does not mean the two are mutually exclusive, as Dina’s testimony shows. It is tempting nonetheless to understand nongkrong as an alternative site for shared creative practice functioning outside such received notions of productivity and capitalist time. However, I feel that this idea needs complicating. The question of what constitutes alternative is a hot topic in Yogya these days as artists become more and more self-aware of how their natural proclivity towards nongkrong and togetherness bears a relationship with larger trends in the contemporary arts dealing with relationality and social practices. Nuraini Juliastuti, another core member of KUNCI, notes that alternative spaces played a significant and special role in the development of art during Reformasi, the period of national democracybuilding following Suharto’s fall from power in 1998. During the late 1990s and early 2000s artists banded together into groups, creating alternatives to the formerly repressive system and opening up the possibilities of cultural production in unprecedented ways.9 This included much socially engaged and politically charged work. On some levels, one might characterise this burst of artistic togetherness as a contemporary and politicised inheritance from the long history of collectivism in the arts, pre-Suharto.

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Historically, young aspiring artists would often join a sanggar, a common workshop headed by a master who served as mentor. Together they would develop the skills of their particular art form, support each other, and form a tightly bonded creative community. During Suharto’s rule, many of these sanggar and other arts organisations were targeted as subversive, labelled as communist and essentially forced (often by violent means) to disband. So there is a historic precedent to understanding today’s proliferation of art collectives and artist-run spaces in Yogya as belonging to this lineage, at least in part.

10. Wardani, Farah, as quoted in Vatikiotis, Michael. “Riding Indonesia’s Art Boom”. Griffith Review. n.d. See https:// griffithreview.com/articles/ riding-indonesias-art-boom/ (Accessed 2016-07-13.) 11. Nuraini, op.cit. 12. Isabella, Brigitta. “Stories of a Space and Those Who Live in It”. In Stories of a space, op.cit., pp. 240-259. 13. Wardani, Farah, as quoted in Vatikiotis, op. cit. 14. From an informal conversation with Farah Wardani at Indonesian Visual Art Archive, 24 September 2013. 15. For more information see: http://kunci.or.id/tag/ made-in-commons/ (Accessed 2016-12-07.)

In spite of Yogya’s continually growing ranks of artist-run initiatives, the globalised pressures of individualism, material gain and professionalism don’t skirt their contemporary arts scene. The global commercialised art market and biennale circuit both churn along hungrily, with notably increasing appetite for South East Asian contemporary art. The 2008 art boom has gone down in lore as the time when huge quantities of young Indonesian artists, even those not yet graduated from art school, were being sought out and their art bought up by collectors looking for new investments. This boom left marked imprints on Yogya’s artists and has in many cases rearranged their Reformasi-era grittiness and experimentalism towards a more commercial outlook. Farah Wardani, a long-time Yogya curator and director of the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive, has referred to the gross overpricing and selling of Indonesian art since the boom as “scary”.10 Nuraini Juliastuti has also commented on the increasing focus of producing sellable work among

Yogya’s artists. She particularly questions the meaning of the oft-used descriptor “alternative space” in Yogya, when so many members of art collectives are being drawn into profit-making motives and the advancement of their individual careers.11 Now, her colleague Brigitta Isabella says a bit wryly, “The word ‘alternative’ might have been overused and reproduced… giving the impression of heroism and romanticism, but it also gives the impression of being obsolete because there have not been enough efforts to actually be ‘alternative’.”12 Given all these odds, I wonder if alternative constitutes more of a state of mind or ideology than a thing that is consistently and recognisably put into practice? I have observed again and again how Yogya’s collectives and artist-run spaces appear to operate in a similarly nebulous and nongkrong-fuelled manner with artists managing to simultaneously pursue both their individual and collaborative projects while still maintaining some semblance of collective identity for the group. Though I also recognise that this is sometimes a surface illusion of harmony disguising the degrees of subtle tensions that inevitably animate group dynamics, clearly Yogya’s artists value and need their togetherness. While many artists are indeed actively cultivating their own commercial success, they claim their requisite nongkrong sessions with friends are still the “soul” that animates their practices. Rather than cultivating separateness within their individual gains, many artists make an effort to maintain their connectivity through nongkrong and the collaborative projects and discussions that grow from it.

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Nongkrong and Theory Suharto’s fall from power and the ensuing “opening up” of Indonesia’s markets, media and bookshelves to once-dangerous ideas and influences undoubtedly also contributed to a greater influx of art theory from beyond the borders. Farah Wardani observes that “What Reformasi actually gave Indonesians was access to intellectual thinking.”13 After years of taking their politically charged nongkrong sessions off-campus to the angkringan for fear of repercussions, university students and artists alike could now fuel their nongkrong dialogues with theories and ideas formerly inaccessible. In spite of this energetic phase, many cultural producers and curators such as Wardani still feel that on a systemic level, Indonesia’s art education is “behind” and needs to offer more critical theory.14 Others I have spoken with, however, feel theory is not, and never has been a significant aspect of how art is made in Indonesia, and are suspicious of its often Western origins. In spite of varying opinions, I observed in 2012-2014 how often titles such as Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics were circulating in conversations. Artists in Yogya are clearly curious about their own tendencies towards participatory and collaborative practices, about what theorists have to say about these things, and use nongkrong to create their own frameworks in which to explore topics not offered in their art school curriculum. It is my personal observation that as socially engaged art becomes increasingly institutionalised and recognised in the United States, for example, the artists practising it are increasingly self-aware and armed with a variety of radically-minded theories to explain their work. It’s interesting to note some of the similar ways in which Yogya artists are also beginning to “institutionalise” their own tendencies towards social engagement. There are increasing numbers of discussions, exhibitions and projects aimed at pursuing questions about collectivity in Yogya. KUNCI Cultural Studies Collective is spearheading much of this dialogue through programmes

such as their ongoing international collaboration, Made in Commons, a forum for exploring the concept and practice of commons across cultures.15 One very clear characteristic that continues to distinguish the collectivism in Yogya from other centres for the arts is its nongkrong fuelled relationship to time. All socially based projects, whether it be the creation of an art collective or a participatory project launched by artists within a given local community, must revolve around the time for non-productive, nongoal-oriented nongkrong. It is the most important and effective means for building and sustaining trust. Interestingly, I perceive that for many non-Indonesian socially engaged artists, there is a desire for such connective and relaxed social time. This spawns the curious situation of experiments with fabricated zones of nongkrong: a sleepover in a gallery, a tea party in a foyer, a pop-up reading room and discussion space, dinner cooked and served in a museum. All of this activity is also being buoyed by an increasingly lengthy reading list of books, articles, and theoretical terminology attempting to wrangle this sprawling discipline into something understandable. Nicolas Bourriaud, the French curator most known for coining the terms “relational aesthetics” and “Altermodern”, was invited to present his work in a lecture for the 2015 Jogja Biennale Forum. This invitation sparked curiosity among local artists and researchers wondering what the theorist might have to say about the already quite relational art scene in Yogya. During the panel discussion following his lecture, Antariksa of KUNCI pressed Bourriaud for his assertion that “new language” is being developed for relationality in the world, signalling a new age in art based upon translation and dialogue across cultures—what he has termed the Altermodern. “I’m a little bit concerned that this penetration of ‘new’ Western political, philosophical or theoretical ideas is a new kind of colonisation. For example, this idea of the relational —it’s already a part of our [Indonesian] lives, but it’s being theorised or perhaps even over-theorised because of work such as yours. We, in Asia, are looking at ourselves through

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your theory.”16 Alia Swastika, director and curator of Ark Galeri, also pressed Bourriaud to consider more deeply the political ripples of how such theory moves through the world, and its affects outside of its intended centre.17 It is important to consider these questions deeply, as they point to some of the potentially problematic side effects of theorising the relational. Theory does have the ability to contextualise and empower contemporary actions, but equally bears the potential of stiffening and institutionalising social relationships. And, as Swastika pointed out, it is necessary to question contexts, especially when uneven dynamics of power, access and representation might be in play.

16. Antariksa in conversation with Nicolas Bourriaud during the panel discussion of his public lecture at Jogja Biennale Forum, Taman Budaya Yogyakarta, 17 November 2015. 17. Swastika, ibid. 18. From an informal conversation with Elia Nurvista at Kedai Kebun Forum, March 2014. 19. Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred, The Undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. New York NY: Minor Compositions. 2013. p. 110. 20. Ibid., p. 104. 21. Swastika, Alia. “The Growth of an Art Scene”. Pipeline: Nurture. No. 45. 2014. pp. 22-39.

In Yogya’s particular context, the nongkrong-as-creative-practice lifestyle adopted by many of the city’s cultural producers is one of the linchpins in understanding how collaboration and collective practice functions outside the overarching umbrella of Western theories and academically defined boundaries. The kinship that binds Yogya’s groups together borders on the familial, which makes for deep commitment, often complicated organisational processes, and a slipperiness that evades formalisation or clear identification.

The School of Nongkrong In Yogya, such long-term relationships form a system of mutual support for the city’s artists that, while informal, clearly affect the circulation of ideas within the larger community. As people move around between different art spaces and cafes, hanging out and discussing

current exhibits and projects, the network of collective investment in the larger community grows. The temporariness and circulation of all these nongkrongs helps facilitate such relationship building, providing an elastic space for creative thought. Elia Nurvista, a Yogya artist whose work centres around the sharing of food, told me with enthusiasm: “Nongkrong is our school!” As she explained it to me, nongkrong’s looseness allows for an open and generous exchange of ideas and information, a casual knowledge-share that many artists, herself included, claim is more influential on their development than their education in actual schools. In her words, “Nongkrong is a place where we can learn from our friends. You can get lots of information from your friends, especially those who study and work with different ideas and topics than you. Friends share ideas and information in a more open way than schools allow.”18 Nongkrong, as an everfluctuating, organic time and space for informal modes of study, provides room for learning based upon casual conversations and group dynamics. Social theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, themselves long-term collaborators in the United States, have put forth related conceptualisations of the term and action of “study”. They are committed to the idea that study is, at heart, a social process; it is something you do with other people. Moten explains it like this: It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion

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of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present… To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice.19

valuation of productive versus unproductive activity. Informal social practices like nongkrong actually behave more fluidly. They meander, transform, dead-end, get lost and re-found through an often untraceable and spontaneous cartography. This time for unfocused exploration is actually one of the key ways in which a great number of Yogya’s artist groups “get things done” together. If there is no nongkrong, I’m told, there is essentially no collaboration.

This conceptualisation of study as social activity speaks in prescient ways to nongkrong’s significance for collective art making in Yogya. Nongkrong is exactly the sort of action Moten and Harney are talking about. It is the hum of relationships and action-in-formation. Indeed, at the core of their equation of study with social interactions is the conviction that collectively shared space of any kind is a situation in which action occurs. Or, put differently: non-productive action carries the seed of action or thought that is actually profoundly productive. Extending this to the process of collaboration more generally, Harney muses:

Alia Swastika acknowledges that the open system of Yogya’s art scene enables a non-hierarchical space in which easy personal relationships between bureaucrats, artists, curators, collectors, and artisans are fostered. While she admits her desire that Yogya create its own more formal structure or system, she also testifies to how the looseness of her own education benefited her:

What’s interesting to me is that the conversations themselves can be discarded, forgotten, but there’s something that goes beyond the conversations which turns out to be the actual project… it’s not the thing that you do; it’s the thing that happens when you’re doing it that becomes important, and the work itself is some combination of the two modes of being.20 In artistic work as well as more academically framed processes of study, it is common practice to approach projects from a standpoint of striving, a drive to “make something happen”. This is a goal-oriented or hypothesis-driven process, regardless how intuitively it may occur. The aim is to ultimately make something—a final output of some sort, be it a work of art or a research paper. This mindset confuses an understanding of how nongkrong or the other casual social processes of “study” that Harney and Moten have proposed function, instead reinforcing the binary

In our art system, where many of us complain about the quality of education in the country, providing a space of informal and free learning is second nature for many established artists and activists. There is always a need for them to encounter, and to be mentors for, a younger generation of artists. I am myself a product of this kind of informal learning. Most of my knowledge was gathered from discussions with senior curators, senior artists and other art practitioners.21 The knowledge produced in such informal channels of study is myriad and sometimes difficult to either qualify or quantify. And nongkrong itself doesn’t always produce something recognisable, something that bears witness to the common intellectual practice Moten and Harney point to. In her thinking through alternativity in Yogya’s arts, Nuraini Juliastuti also questions what knowledge actually is, and how it is created. According to her, “Knowledge has no fixed meaning. It is related to our memory and our vision. It is a kind of capital and a tool of cultural exchange. It puts one in a situation where ‘to read and to be read’ is in a continuum and creates possibilities of creating

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new maps of production and distribution.”22 I think this idea of reading and being read serves as an apt metaphor for how nongkrong, at its best, allows artists to interact and share their own expertise and experiences outside of more formal structures such as school and the commercial art market. Harking back to Moten and Harney, a good nongkrong can be conceptualised as minds at work while bodies are at ease.

When Nongkrong Fails

22. Nuraini, op. cit., p. 268. 23. As described to me during interview with Syafiatudina at Kedai Kebun Forum, 3 March 2014. 24. Hyde, op. cit., p. 196. 25. Crosby, Alexandra. Festivals in Java: Localising cultural activism and environmental politics, 20052010. PhD in International Studies. Sydney: University of Technology, 2013.

Of course, there are politics of inclusion and exclusion in any social group—an in-crowd and its peripheries. For all that I have been arguing thus far to conceptualise nonkrong as a model practice for non-hierarchical, non-productive creative and intellectual time, in actual practice it naturally has imperfections. At Kedai Kebun Forum, a cafe and arts space and one of the favoured artist nongkrong spots, there is a huge mural depicting caricatures of a great number of Yogya’s well-known artists and musicians. I have overheard a couple of people whose faces are not featured on the mural expressing a feeling of being “left out” or not being “in enough”. A few collectives in Yogya also do not mix because their ideologies don’t match and the members have developed a quiet rivalry. Yogyakarta’s artist nongkrongs often suffer from a noticeable gender imbalance as well. Historically a male activity due to the differing zones of sociality between men and women—men generally having greater access to and presence in the public sphere—nongkrong in the arts scene still often excludes women as equal

players. A number of Yogya’s groups have long operated as “boys’ clubs” with generally all-male membership. Artists operating spaces outside of the centralised and popularised arts neighbourhood just south of the Sultan’s palace sometimes express such comments as “It’s just exhausting” regarding the goings on at the collectives in the centre. While the in-crowds always seem to welcome a great diversity of visitors for their openings and events, I have the impression that their nongkrong circles are sometimes rather clearly defined. Not everyone always feels welcome to nongkrong at every place, or even inclined to join. There are certainly different personalities to each nongkronghosting group or space. Far from the “ideal type” of collective practice that it might otherwise appear to be, nongkrong in practice is, like any microcosm of a larger cultural or social habitus, fraught with the forms of inequality that pervade its social life. Nongkrong is, after all, a living organism, subject to both internal and external stresses. Sometimes external factors such as architecture even cause a collapse of healthy nongkrong. As an example of this, MES 56, Yogya’s well-established and respected contemporary photography collective, was suffering a crisis of sorts during my first research period in 2012-2014. The issue was that their building at the time did not support good nongkrong. The former house they had shared for many years with KUNCI was universally remembered as a beloved and ideal nongkrong spot. It was an older Javanese house, which opened first into a large public room— used then as gallery and project space— and became increasingly more intimate as one progressed through the house. At

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the back was an open courtyard where people were constantly gathering, hanging out, chatting, taking smoke breaks, and partying nearly every night. Several rooms branched off this central courtyard, which allowed for a freedom of movement and choice in how people interacted with both the space and the social gatherings. Someone could retreat into one of the rooms to get some work done, but leave the door open so as to remain connected to the conversations and activity outside.23 Their house in 2012-2014 was a rather severe twostoried rectangle, with the gallery space on the ground floor and the social space on the first floor. Because of this fragmentation and the closed-in feeling, MES’s younger members said nongkrong in that space felt obligatory, it didn’t allow for fluidity in how people interacted with each other and the space. The architecture was, in effect, killing the nongkrong. And this was ultimately harming the cohesiveness of the organisation. It is interesting to consider that a practice so based upon temporary encounters and non-permanence, nonetheless does require a kind of permanence or groundedness in the built environment; it requires space that will reliably accommodate flow. So, when nongkrong “fails”, how can it be repaired, and what are the larger ramifications? For those non-Indonesian social practice artists trying to remedy their perceived lack of hangout culture, it may also be relevant to ask whether it is actually possible to create nongkrong where it never existed. Is it a thing that can be consciously “made”?

Conclusion: The Privilege of Participation While at root a relatively simple human interaction free of the theoretical baggage that attends larger discussions about contemporary art, nongkrong can indeed be an ideal playground for social experimentation. Its flexibility and informality produce networks of interactions that scheduled, formalised

social time don’t tend to accommodate. But in my study of it, I am occasionally nagged by the selfdefeating question of whether it is also possible to “kill” nongkrong by over-analysing it. As a student of nongkrong I do take this question seriously. I can’t help but recall Lewis Hyde’s caution that “the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part.”24 Alexandra Crosby, an Australian researcher whose thesis focused on cultural and environmental activism in Java in the period 2005-2010, has also acknowledged that nongkrong is a sensitive organism. But she points out that nongkrong can be learnt, and in fact, for foreigners such as ourselves, must be learned in order to assimilate well into creative Indonesian communities. For a non-Indonesian researching these activist circles, participating in this kind of communication, and particularly the kind of listening it involves, is essential for understanding group dynamics in a way that may not emerge in one-on-one interviews. A methodology that builds on nongkrong is one that acknowledges the kind of collective thinking that occurs in such spaces.25 My own welcome into so many of Yogya’s creative nongkrong circles is likewise a privilege to which I owe a debt of gratitude. It is through nongkrong that I have learnt to listen in new ways, making me receptive to forms of embodied social wisdom that might otherwise have been obscured to me. And, as I have tried to show, to understand the workings of creative practice in Yogyakarta specifically, requires a recognition of collaborative process as a living manifestation of artists’ relationships to each other. At their best, art nongkrongs are the social group equivalent of a pamong, a mentor figure or facilitator, one who creates room for you to select your tools and then figure out how to use them.

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Abstract This conversation took place across two Skype conversations between Edgar Schmitz, Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans following the 2015 PARSE conference, linking the concerns of temporality, economics, confidence, fabulation and the time of exhibition found in the ideas and practices of the artists.

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Never Really in Real Time

Edgar Schmitz

Vermeir & Heiremans

Edgar Schmitz is an artist who produces escapist backdrops from film, sculpture, animation and writing. His work has been presented in national and international group exhibitions including “London Movies”, Bozar, Brussels (2005); “A.C.A.D.E.M.Y.”, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2006); Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2006); “No Soul for Sale”, Tate Modern, London (2010); British Art Show 7, Hayward Touring (2010/11). It has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the ICA, London (with Liam Gillick, 2006); FormContent, London (2010); Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2012) and Himalayas Art Museum, Shanghai (2015). Schmitz has also written extensively on contemporary art, with contributions to Kunstforum International, Texte zur Kunst and Artforum as well as contemporary, tema celeste and numerous catalogue essays. His book on Hubs and Fictions (with Sophia Hao) has just been published by Sternberg Press. Schmitz is a Senior Lecturer in Art at Goldsmiths, London.

Vermeir & Heiremans are an artistic duo living and working in Brussels. They have presented their work at the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); Arnolfini, Bristol (2009); Kassel Documentary Film Festival (2009); Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi–do (2010); Loop, Barcelona (2010); Videoex, Zurich (2011); Salt, Istanbul (2011); Viennale, Vienna (2011); Argos, Brussels (2012); Extra City, Antwerp (2012); 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2012); Manifesta 9, Genk (2012); CA2M, Madrid (2013); 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Rotwand Gallery, Zurich (2014), Stroom Den Haag (2014), Triennale Brugge (2015), 4th Dojima River Biennale, Osaka (2015).

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Introduction 1: Vermeir & Heiremans In 2006 Vermeir & Heiremans initiated a long-term project that focuses on the reciprocal relationship of art, architecture and economy. In this collaborative practice the artists nominated their home, a loft apartment in a post-industrial building in Brussels, as an artwork. The public does not have access to the artwork. Instead the artists use the home as source material for the production of “mediated extensions”, such as installations, videos, performances, interviews, publications and so on that transform the “house as artwork” into a virtual discursive site.1 In this project Vermeir & Heiremans started to investigate how to “financialise” a “house as artwork”, how to make it “liquid” without having to sell the house. The result was ART HOUSE INDEX (AHI—), an experimental financial index that measures the economic and symbolic value of the “house as artwork”, including the cultural capital and other symbolic values that Vermeir & Heiremans, as “public persona”, accrue. The index is itself both an artwork as well as a functioning financial index. Art House Index gathers real-time information from different parameters that compose the index, such as the art and real estate markets, but also information from the attention economy, e.g. visitors to the artists’ website. Auction prices are not calculated in this index, since the work of Vermeir & Heiremans is not present in the auction market. The different data assembled are “weighed” against one another for their greatest relevance in measuring the “value” of the “house as artwork”. An algorithm continuously recalculates this information, resulting in an abstract number going up or down. At this moment it is not possible to invest in the index itself, but the artists are currently researching the conditions under which financial products could be developed to trade on the index.

In the film Masquerade, a “factual-fiction reportage”, a TV reporter tells the story of the protested “initial public offering” (IPO) of AHI—.2 Art House Index was publicly presented for the first time in the form of a lecture-performance in a corporate conference room inside the Marmara Hotel on Taksim Square during the public programme of the 13th Istanbul Biennial. The form of an IPO was chosen in reference to ceremonies being organised for launching a company on the stock market. The performance was interrupted by activists protesting against the corporate sponsorship of the biennial and its (in)direct role in gentrification issues in the city. The corporate role-playing by Vermeir & Heiremans launching a financial index added to the confusion. In the end Vermeir & Heiremans decided to integrate the protests in their film Masquerade, reflecting also their own not-neutral position as artists. Masquerade is a film that addresses a specific intersection of the contemporary art and finance markets, through the filter of Melville’s novel The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857) as the structure for its episodic narration. The film takes its name from the subtitle of Melville’s novel. In the film Masquerade Vermeir & Heiremans present the financial market as the mise en scène and a leading character of the narrative. The artists also created an “installation version” of their film, in which the financial market influences the real-time “cutting” of the film. The actual performance of AHI—, showing the index going up or down triggers in “real time” a switch between two timelines, one of which shows the “finished” film while the other captures variations, rehearsals and outtakes. The artists have no control over the “editing” of Masquerade, the markets creating a unique moment in time as it is statistically highly improbable one will ever get to see the same combinations twice. Vermeir & Heiremans staged Masquerade as their contribution to the 2015 PARSE conference on Time.

Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans

Introduction 2: Edgar Schmitz Schmitz’ work mobilises gallery settings towards film by orchestrating the way they oscillate between material, atmospheric and narrative promises. Across a diverse body of work, including sculpture, sound, animation and writing, his sub-filmic clusters act as portals into and escape hatches from the exhibition as event. Since 2012, Schmitz has been working across two interconnected bodies of work: Surplus Cameo Decor, a solo exhibition realised between Dundee in 2012 and Shanghai in 2015, and alovestorysomewherearound2046, a film treatment as work-in-progress towards a movie always yet to be made. For Surplus Cameo Decor, Schmitz expanded on recent works that had elaborated on tactics of cultural camouflage and withdrawal from the exhibition as event, and installed a series of ambient backdrops in the Cooper Gallery that turned the space into a semi-fictional hub for cinematic plots and invited cameo appearances, complete with cinematic trailer flickering in the foyer and three large-scale neon signs announcing the different episodes of this “exhibition as movie”. Episode 1, palasthotel, was named after an East Berlin hotel in the German Democratic Republic of foreign travel under Stasi surveillance, and featured one of the building’s iconic bronzetinted honeycomb windows. Episode 2, horizontes soroa, was set in the swimming pool of a remote Cuban resort, under

refurbishment in the early 2000s. Episode 3, sindanao, took its title from the fictional South China Sea island in a 1986 Ulli Lommel horror movie, and is set in 2017, just before the opening of the M+ super-museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. The various episodes were inhabited by art and film world protagonists who made cameo appearances as themselves in the galleryas-set. All of these cameo appearances were documented in photo shoots in the gallery setting. alovestorysomewherearound2046 is an ongoing collaboration between Edgar Schmitz and Pieternel Vermoortel that pre- and post-produces their exhibitions into a generic love story set in the near future. The treatment is elaborated in collaboration with film industry professionals providing their expertise, as well as artists contributing motifs and devices to be scripted into the material. As a format inhabiting multiple overlapping temporalities between pre- and postproduction, Schmitz and Vermoortel staged alovestorysomewherearound2046 as their contribution to the 2015 PARSE conference on Time.

1. See www.in-residence.be (Accessed 2016-07-14.) 2. See https://vimeo.com/ 133391587. Password M2015 (Accessed 201607-14.)

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Conversation After meeting at the Parse conference on Time in Göteborg in 2015, Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans continued their conversation on “time”, the cinematic and their mode of production in their current work and practice.

Film and (Real) Time ES: When it comes to questions of film and time as they concern us here, one of the keys seems to be the invocation of “real time”, and how our works oscillate between translation, illustration and commentary. We are both interested in the potential of what we might refer to as “film”: as format, as technique of deferral, as mode of transferral, and as commentary on real-world structures that are scripted into film. One of the starting points through which we may be able to talk about our respective works and how film technique supports them, then, is time: the spectre of real time, the time of mediation, and the possibilities film opens up to engage with anticipation and deferral as well as more immediate proximities to real time, in supposedly real-world constellations. If indeed there ever is such a thing as real time, or indeed real-world infrastructures. Masquerade seems to be evoking and provoking something like a real world of measurable effects, not least in the way in which the work is underpinned by the real-time ticking of the Art House Index, and its conditioning of the edit. RH: In the film Masquerade we were looking for ways to use the film medium as a direct expression of confidence, the film’s central theme. We tried to make a film not about confidence, but rather have our film incorporate confidence. That’s how we came to the idea to use green key during the shoot. Hence also the title Masquerade, since the ultimate form of masquerade in film, you could say, is filming in green key and composing images in post-production. Having made that decision, we could go into the

idea of how to present this material in such a way that the audience watching the film would ask: can we trust this image? Or is it something the filmmakers have constructed for us, as a kind of makebelieve? So when presenting the live version of Masquerade, the audience sees the film as part of the real-time performance of Art House Index. You could say that the real-time editing is performed by the market, not by us. When markets are up, a fully post-produced film in terms of sound and image is projected. All green backdrops are filled out perfectly, while the actors are doing their lines in an eloquent way. When the index goes down, the backdrops consist of unfinished green-key shots, while the actors are rehearsing or keep forgetting their lines. A film normally stitches you into its narrative, into its illusion, but here, every time the index goes down, the viewer is not only confronted with the production conditions of the film, but also with the present moment of screening of the film and the surroundings in which this is happening. KV: You could even say that the real-time attention of the public watching the film influences the behaviour of the index, and consequently the film they are watching. The screening becomes an interactive performance, mediated through this financial instrument. Every ten seconds the index re-calculates the values constituted by its parameters. In that way it provokes a disruption in the dominant experience of cinema, in which the viewer cannot step out of the A-to-Z film-time, fixed in the narrative and duration of the film reel. I remember the Situationists used to escape this dominant narrative experience by going in and out of several cinema theatres, in this way “editing” in memory a new film from the fragments they had seen in the different screenings. RH: In your work, would you say that you also include the viewer in a real-time situation, since you present “film” in a material form?

Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans

Vermeir & Heiremans, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Masquerade â&#x20AC;&#x153; (set photos), 2015. Photographs by Michael De Lausnay.

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ES: The exhibitions and the script that I have been working on recently are set up in such a way that they never really become film. They never take on the materiality of film. One of the differences worth talking about is what we mean by film, and what I have also described as the cinematic. Because it seems to me that one of the concerns around the immersive plausibility of film is that there is such a thing as an immersive space that you are then disrupting, through the edits, and the green key, and the alienation effects, which you deploy in a truly Brechtian sense, if I understand your work correctlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they all work against the backdrop of a really tight sense of illusion and immersion. And I find it interesting that this is premised not, in Masquerade, for instance, so much on the notion of the feature film as it is premised on a hard-nosed model of investigative journalism and the documentary format, which is very specific in terms of the attention it demands of an audience. What is interesting in the discrepancy between what you are working on and what I am working on, is that I borrow and appropriate and stage material that is so compromised by being somewhat outdated and half-remembered and fragmented, that it never really demands that level of immersive attention in the first place. There is a marked difference in texture between a feature film as a heavily dispersed, distributed and fragmented format, and forms of what we might call investigative journalism, which make a more direct claim on truth and knowledge production and formation. KV: I would not call it investigative journalism. We often wrong-foot the viewer since our film mixes fact and fiction. ES: We end up in a similarly deliberately unhinged space, in terms of viewer interaction and attention. But we are coming at it from exactly opposite directions. You are dismantling and disrupting something that would normally demand full attention, and would require a certain amount of faith in the plausibility of the narrative. The way in

which I stage a lot of my materials works the other way round; by saturating the exhibition space with an atmospheric fabric or texture that is sutured together from this rather deflated shrapnel of filmic narratives. I wonder whether the result of such a semi-confused, somewhat wrong-footed encounter with the work, is not in the end very similar. RH: How would you describe the part of the visitor, are they a character in what you stage? ES: I do not want to have a straight answer to this, because I do not want to think about the exhibition as necessarily a viewer invitation. I think about these situations much more as productions, more a studio situation than an exhibition situation. The gallery becomes the set for the production of a series of narratives that may or may not afford viewers the opportunity to participate. What happens though, whether I like it or not (and of course I do, to some extent, by now, like it) is that people then see themselves invited to invent roles for themselves. RH: They are stitched in by the environment they enter, or should I say intrude? KV: Who are the cameos? ES: What was really precise about the set of cameo invitations both in Dundee originally, and then in Shanghai, was that we sent invitations to these people asking them to appear as themselves in the gallery-as-set and have a picture taken. Not filmed, but by means of one photograph, which becomes the official way of rendering the exhibition. Of course that kind of invitation is slightly different for someone who lives nearby. It has a different currency if you invite someone like Wang Naming, whom we had to fly into Dundee from Shanghai. The terms were identical for all the invitations, but what they then made of these differed from character to character. We had Lisa Le Feuvre, who was a co-funder of the exhibition, and director of the Henry Moore Institute, and also a close friend, and

Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans

who was invited to talk at the roundtable conversations. When she came to Dundee, to the gallery, she decided to do what she always does; to look at the art, but to do it a bit more slowly, for the purpose of the photographs. So she turned herself into a slowmotion version of herself.

RH: Are the photos presented in the show, as part of the scenery you develop? ES: They do not become part of the exhibition, but are part of its afterlife, a record, sometimes I use them in a publication. The exhibition is seen as a set, saturated with narrative fragments, and a displaced

Top and bottom right: Edgar Schmitz,“Surplus Cameo Decor: sindanao 2”, 2015, installation views with Zhao Dayong. Courtesy British Council collection, Shanghai.

Left: Edgar Schmitz, “Surplus Cameo Decor: sindanao 2”, 2015, production still. Courtesy British Council collection, Shanghai, photograph Mai Mai/ Himalayas.

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association with filmic locations in time. It was important not to import the images back into the show. KV: The quotes of fragments you used come from Hollywood and art house film. But the conversation in alovestorysomewhereaorund2046, how does that fit in? ES: The lovestory was originally a way of not responding to a request to contribute to an exhibition. We were invited to participate in No Soul for Sale at Tate Modern in 2010, and we ended up thinking a lot about how we could counter that invitation, or how we could inhabit it, in a way in which we were not simply producing or displaying our goods for the benefit of Tate’s visibility. So rather than present something for and in the Tate, we decided to recycle Tate for our own production, and to invert the economy slightly. Instead of showing work, we organised a series of guided tours through the collection of Tate Modern by way of which we collected material towards a script. Like location scouting the museum. And the suggestion of a love story somewhere around 2046 seemed as generic, future-bound and as useful as possible. A script, set in the future, in the shape of a generic love story. We would go around and we found a really nice strip of blue in a Mondrian which then became the colour of the wallpaper in the hotel bedroom where the lovers first meet. So appropriating some aspects of Tate and their collection and architecture, as material for the script. This also opened a space between preand post-production that has since become a really important space within which to work. We first invited casting director Dan Hubbard, who had worked on the Bourne movies and who has also worked with amateur actors and Greenspan on United 93: we sent him a series of installation shots, some of the cameo shots, the press release statements made for the exhibition, and asked him how he would go about casting this. When he accepted the invitation, he came in for a panel

conversation at LUX, the centre for artists’ moving image in London. We introduced the motifs of the show and he talked us through his knowledge of casting and what he might want to do. It became a conversation about the exhibition, but also one in which we were trading vocabularies around casting, naturalism, illusion, each of us under slightly different terms. We then had an agency director, Tony Noble who had been DoP for Duncan Jones’ Moon, talking about making sets and props, quite technically really. And then we had Andy Nicholson, who was head of production for Cuarón’s Gravity. We talked at length about what the vantage point of the artist or the curator or the choreographer in view of the overall production, which would be an exhibition, might be. But he was also talking much more pragmatically about Tim Burton sitting on a chair with a pre-visualisation version of the movie on a screen, and an actress in front of him, in front of a green screen, but in costume and holding a real prop. And it seemed really interesting to see to which extent we could appropriate those terminologies and those technical constructions. RH: You speaking about the cameos reminds me of the fact that half of the people in our film are enacting their roles in daily life. ES: Maybe I can turn that into a question concerning your use of the cameos. It seems to be a question about how many registers of legibility we are introducing. RH: The characters were “playing” themselves, as is the case for your cameos: people are aware of their identity, but are estranged from themselves by the setting in which we have put them. In this artificial environment they re-enact themselves, they “play” the curator, or the banker. Melville talks about this. A person can and has to fulfil many different roles at the same time. A person can be an auctioneer, a father, a shopkeeper. You play all these roles at the same time, you can go out and wear a different mask every day.

Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans

KV: Which brings us to our own position, our own implication in the work. In Masquerade we are “playing” ourselves, promoting the artist brand.

it could work. So yes, you could say that this project triggered an exchange between people who would not usually meet.

RH: This is also what we were doing during a performance at the 13th Istanbul Biennial, which was one of the first stages in developing Masquerade. The performance was interrupted by artist-activists who protested against the biennial itself as a gentrifying agent in the city. For them our participation in the biennial made us part of the problem, something that was emphasised by the corporate perspective of the performance. For the audience it must have been pretty confusing, watching our performance and the activists’ agit-prop theatre at the same time. Was the whole thing perhaps staged by us? Reflecting on what happened while rewriting the performance as a film script, we decided we had to integrate the protests and ourselves as artists explicitly in our film. The protests showed us clearly that there is no such position as that of a neutral observer of events.

ES: Where does that leave you with regards to the alienation effect you deploy to de-naturalise the viewing conditions, the truth claim etc.?

ES: There is an oscillation between the person, their professional and personal identities and how they are then cast, the persona they become and then identify or dis-identify with. Within the real time of production, how does it play out when Andrea Phillips hosted you and the film, in which she is the main character, in Gothenburg at PARSE? Is that another real time with a similar persona? In the economical field around the film, there cannot be a clear cut between real-life situations, persona, and their filmic render. How important is it for you that those relationships also change through the way in which they are being staged? To which extent is the film also a way of starting a conversation with a banking expert? Even though you are not interviewing them, you are creating a sense of proximity if not intimacy. RH: We organised a workshop in which one of the guest speakers was a real asset manager, specialised in art as an alternative investment. Simple as our index is, he was still fascinated by it, and convinced

KV: We recently attended a conference on art and finance, where they openly spoke about the need for more transparency in the primary (galleries) and secondary (auctions) art markets. This would be beneficial for the businesses that work on financialising art. These would very much like to have more transparency, especially in the primary art market, because it would generate more data and would open up a huge new market for them. Until now only so-called blue chip art works could be financialised. More transparency and regulations could cause disruption in the art market, but it would help the businesses working on its financialisation to grow. We have noticed however that financialisation exclusively benefits the investor. No thought is given to the producer/artist. We wonder if it would be possible to develop financial derivatives that would also benefit the producer and be the basis for a more sustainable art practice. Art House Index is a first attempt to elaborate on this thought. ES: Inhabiting or amending these infrastructures of finance from within is an interesting attempt to project future change, or at least the possibility of change, and invent or carve out a space in real time within which to work with these infrastructures. This seems very different from more conventionally analytical research-based practice. It is bound up in the conceit of reproduction, into which it feeds. That temporality of a space of distribution and of production seems to be making a claim on real time while being entangled with future prospects. You spoke earlier about the reality of the market and making a claim in that reality with AHI, getting out of the mode of talking about something and tying it up with those realities instead.

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KV: Outside representation... RH: The film is of course still representation. The index might evolve in a different direction, becoming a financial tool with real-world consequences, but that’s still very much a question, and maybe a bit overambitious. On the other hand, and this is something very concrete, we also interact closely with other artists and together we have set up a platform for research and production called Jubilee. What we research in our artistic work is also fed into this platform. So there are two “realities”: one is our artwork, which includes imagination, fiction and fact, the other is about our real production conditions, on which we focus in Jubilee. It includes writing contracts, dossiers, setting up a logistical structure, but also creating more leverage, influencing cultural policies, trying to weigh on institutions that define the conditions in which we have to work. ES: There are two different realms, which are of course not separate. Reclaiming the infrastructure also means reclaiming narratives of legitimation and validation. This overlaps somewhat with earlier excursions into institutional realities by artists. These are now often referred to as institutional critique, but of course they have very little to do with the revelatory piety suggested by this narrative. Art is not economically static or indeed reliable, and foregrounding its production as well as distribution is one way of insisting on this dynamic. Not only its economic performance as investment vehicle is precarious, unclear and therefore subject to so much speculative investment attention. It is also unclear how that distribution can be rearranged. And that’s why it can be done, even if the outcomes remain unclear. In spite of the various object fixations of the art market, an expanded economy of art is inevitably an economy of production and distribution. But there is a risk of obliterating a clear conversation around conditions of production insofar as these are time-based. We need to construct situations of production that are at least plausible, even if not sus-

tainable. With the cameos there are these overlaps, and I was interested in how that then outperformed itself: I invite someone in from Shanghai as an exoticised stand-in for some idea of remoteness, and he invites me back into his institution in Shanghai. So where do these realities belong? In the realm of symbolic narrative fiction or in the institutional, economical realm? The show in Shanghai was then called “the revenge of the cameo”, in which I was at his mercy of interpreters and photographers taking pictures… This is not a question of precedence between symbolic, financial and institutional registers (which conditions precede the others, and that are thus constituted as resultant) but rather a question of how can one temporarily subsume the other. This is an escapist attitude, one of subterfuge, rather than one of analytical engagement. RH: When you use the cameo, do you include a gallerist? Or only people related to the production of film? ES: The exhibition was not directly configured in view of an art market reality as such. It would have been counter-intuitive to use this as a device for soliciting further economies that are not already at play and implicated in the germination and the production of the project. The range that seemed immediately available to the project at the time spanned funding bodies to curators and commentators, through to film directors who might have made a film that then produced the narrative conceit for the exhibition. This was not a deliberate attempt to exclude or circumvent the art market, but simply a realistic stock take that aligned producers from the film context as well as those of an art economy in the broader sense. KV: We can talk a bit about the economies of invitation. The power structures inherent in invitations. For example, when you had to re-enact yourself as cameo, as a “revenge” in Shanghai.

Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans

ES: Of course there is an economy to the invitation, there is a coercive, transactional dimension to any invitation, like a gift: how you issue it, what happens when you accept it, what that entails. I do believe that performing this, playing with it, or playing within it, resonates with possibilities of production, and possibly also intervention. Of course there is also a flirtatious dimension to all of this. Invitations trade on mutual seduction. You can invite people in because they are interested in the art world resonance of what you do. For the cameos, for the Hollywood people—what kind of fascinations can you trade on? You suddenly have access to expertise and knowledge that normally, industrially or infrastructurally, you would not have access to, because you can offer up the fascination for a left-field art project that might resonate with their attempts to look sideways from their industrial frameworks. I would not go so far as to say that this is emancipatory or disruptive, but it is a space of transaction that allows you to occupy a position you would not normally, economically, be able to occupy legitimately. You can trade the art thing not so much as symbolic capital rather as affective capital, and atmospheric promise. The kind of appeal cinema might have had once. The behind-the-scene fetish plays into this as well of course, the oscillation between production and distribution, even though, and especially since they are largely indistinguishable in most practices now. KV: The whole idea of the economics of invitation reminds me a lot of Melville’s book. It is a critique of “professional” trust, in which all relationships are regarded as financial transactions. The so-called Confidence Man tests his victim’s confidence and binds them with a financial contract. Invitations operate similarly of course.

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Abstract Time is divided into static time and dynamic time, the first to be called aion, the second to be called chronos. Aion is the incorporeal, omnipresent host of events. Chronos, however, is time in being. If we regard chronos as being quasi-objective—the mere passing of equal parts of time—then kairos would express how this time is being. In this article I claim that any shape of kairos stands to chronos, as Euclidean space stands to topological space. Previous work with students of cinema and architecture made clear there were no instruments precise enough to describe different states of time. This led to the development of a taxonomy of the appearances of time, which are reflections of the progression of time from the moment it transformed from aion into chronos. This article will present this taxonomy, called “Eight Avatars of Time”, using the following categories: volume, significance, necessity, sequence, bearing, indexicality, simultaneity and proximity. It will also elaborate on how this nomenclature is helpful to bridge philosophical concepts of time with the practice of manipulating time.

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Eight Avatars of Time: An Affective Temporal Taxonomy of the Epistemology of Time beyond Chronology

Marc Boumeester Dr Marc Boumeester is the Director of the AKI Academy of Art & Design, part of the ArtEZ University of the Arts. Previously, he was a researcher at Delft University of Technology, Department of Architecture, specialising in the emerging capacities of the relation between cinema and architecture. He

has co-founded and led the Interactive/Media/Design Department at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag. His research focuses on the interplay between non-anthropocentric desire, socio-architectural conditions and unstable media, cinema in particular. He publishes on media-philosophy and art theory.

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1. Waddington, Conrad. The Strategy of the Genes. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1957. 2. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2000 [1972]. p. 272. 3. Thelen, Esther and Smith, Linda. “Dynamic Systems Theories”. In Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol.1 Theoretical Models of Human Development, Damon Lerner (ed.). Sixth Edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. 2006. pp. 258-312. 4. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2002. 5. Kwinter, Sanford, Architectures of time: toward a theory of the event in modernist culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2002.

Epigenetics One of the premises of this paper is the assumption that an outcome of becoming is never the product of a logical necessity, but contingently obligatory. This allows for the existence of multiple optima, indicating the possibility of the formation of different, yet equally important outcomes. Moreover, this outcome can only be established after its formation, never as a result of a predefined procedure. Evolutionary biologist and philosopher Conrad Waddington developed a metaphorical landscape to visualise the ways in which evolution progresses and “takes turns”. This is called the “Epigenetic landscape” and is an excellent allegory for this presupposition.1 His scheme consists of a number of marbles rolling down a hill.

The particular path taken by the marble is called chreode (also spelled chreod or creode), a term coined by Waddington. It holds both the meaning path and the meaning necessity. This necessity-path is used in conjunction with the concept of homeostasis, which describes systems that return to a steady trajectory. Each marble will “compete” for the grooves on the slope, and eventually all will come to rest at the lowest points. The marble presents a mutation in time and the grooves present the number of options the marbles are confronted with (in the “making” of evolution). The “competition” of the marbles and the attraction of the different grooves could not only affect the outcome of the distribution, but also affect the landscape itself.

“The Epigenetic Landscape”, Dr. Mhairi Towler, Link Li and Dr. Paul Harrison - all Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee.

Marc Boumeester

Within the anthropocentric domain we could perhaps regard “autonomous” drives (the need for food, sex, shelter, warmth and so on) as being the deep attractors in Waddington’s epigenetic landscape and name them desires. We could take “connected” drives (such as interactions, stimuli, preferences) as specified forms of drives and call them affects. In that case (in relation to Waddington) desires could be seen as the strength of the attractions (the depth of the groove) and affects can be seen as accelerators (the slope of the groove). Affects are, to paraphrase Gregory Bateson, “the differences that make a difference”.2 To be able to experience these strata, to witness and engage with these flows in everyday life, is called “intensive thinking”. The concept of epigenetics plays an essential role in the understanding of perceptions of time, as it is in the creation of dynamic time that both matter is actualised (the form of content) and expressed (the form of expression). Psychologists Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith have a specific take on Waddington’s epigenetic landscape as a metaphor for dynamic systems theory.3 The introduction of the epigenetic landscape and its subsequent formalisation has played a major role in the understanding of the stochastic variation in cell development (as a system) and cell differentiation and propagation (at the level of the cells itself). In more general terms, system dynamics are modes of comprehending the behaviour of complex systems over time. Dynamic systems theory studies the whole complexity of a given system, including all feedback loops, time delays, interferences, flows and contingencies that constitute the particular system. The primary aptitude that this approach gives us is the strength of non-linearity and stages contingency as the prime mode of thought. System dynamics shows how seemingly small and insignificant forces within a system can have a tremendous impact on the development of the system as a whole and on its physical manifestations. There are many good reasons to use this system in a larger theory, even if there are critical

forces claiming that the concept belongs to the dominion of biology and should be regarded purely as a conceptual framework within that realm. Biological development follows paths that are very well described by mathematics, and perhaps the mere existence of mathematical logic stems from the imprint of biological development. Given the element of the development of systems over long timeframes (beyond the lifetime of any living creature), analogical thinking would be the only instrument of research that can be applied. The very moment the virtual becomes the actual can be called an event, as Brian Massumi puts it: Call that substanceless and durationless moment the pure event. The time of the event does not belong per se to the body in movement-vision or even to the body without an image. They incur it. It occurs to them. As time form it belongs to the virtual, defined as that which is maximally abstract yet real, whose reality is that of potentialpure relationality, the interval of change, the in-itself of transformation. It is a time that does not pass, that only comes to pass.4 The entire course of the chreode is determined by all these variances and there is absolutely no difference between conscious and unconscious behaviour: it all falls under the same set of systems. Architectural theorist Sandford Kwinter refers to the system of the chreode as an invisible but not imaginary future in an invisible but not imaginary landscape.5 With this Kwinter emphasises that the chreode’s path is not literally foreseeable because of the complexity of the acting elements, yet it does not have unlimited degrees of freedom, especially because of these actors.

Anticipation and Other Actors It is possible to contextualise some of the actors that influence the way we perceive time through the perspective of philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept

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6. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. [1969] 1990. 7. Gilles Deleuze: “The crystal is like a ratio cognoscendi of time, while time, conversely, is ratio essendi. What the crystal reveals or makes visible is the hidden ground of time. That is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which is preserved. Time simultaneously makes the present pass and preserves the past in itself. There are, therefore, already, two possible time- images, one grounded in the past, the other in the present. Each is complex and is valid for time as a whole.” See Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. London: Continuum.1989. p. 95. 8. See Reichenbach, Hans. The Direction of Time. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 1956; Sider, Theodore. Four-Dimensionalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2001; and Sklar, Lawrence. Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley, CA: University of California. 1974. 9. Mullarkey, John. “Thinking Time Beyond Philosophy: On Widder’s Nonsense of Time”. Parrhesia. No. 9. 2010. pp. 52- 54.

of the “Body without Organs”.6 This concept has become an often used way to describe the distribution of “basins” or nebula, of flows, potentiality, relations, affects, engagements, and so forth, that are also part of our body-mind, but do not belong to the physical, i.e. actual world. This extended part of the body is by no means unreal: it not only influences all actualisations directly, but it is also a place where experience is actualised. An actualisation is a body that “crystallises” from a field of potential into “something” present. That process can produce tangible results, but not all actualisations are tangible. For instance, a dangerous situation can be feared (it is real because it can happen), when it actualises it is real and happening, yet not tangible. One could think of standing on a beam of fifteen centimetres wide and four metres long, which is not a difficult task if the beam were lying on the floor. Yet it becomes difficult when this beam is attached to and suspended between two buildings, 30 metres high. The void may not even be seen as an entity; its effects are very substantial nevertheless. The fear alone can already cause substantial damage. Any component is always part of many assemblages, so therefore its properties can never explain the relations that are exterior to its body, let alone explain anything about it as a whole. This whole does not exist of (the connections of) its components in a formally logical way, that would make the component a logically necessary part of that totality. And this would be assuming a predeterministic position, the whole is then supposed to be prior to its own existence. Rather, these relations are “merely”

contingently obligatory in order to create the whole, which is at the core of the thought that gives us the “Epigenetic landscape”. This is the “moment” before causality kicks in (without causality there is no chronology); it is a state of nonchronological time. This occurs before recognition, automation and classification (before the ball starts “rolling” down the hill).7

Taxonomy It is imperative to stress the ethereal character of these notions. Matter is not to be seen as material in a classical sense: it can be both virtual and actual. The actual exists and the virtual “subsists”, the latter can be energy, material or motion, but whatever the case, it is real. This notion of reality is highly significant since it bridges the realms of the virtual and the actualised, the potential and the unfolded, in other words, all the elements of the assemblage. The origin of the following taxonomy of time, or rather the classification of the appearances of time, comes from the practice of pedagogy. For years I have been working with students in different settings on topics related to or stemming from the work on the relationship between two media: architecture and moving image. These meetings also served as a testing ground for some of the research on the reversal of the space-time axis, which enabled me to harvest insights and opinions from an architectural point of view. The initial concept hinged on the proposition that time is antecedent to space; space is created through motion and is not something

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that has pre-given existence. Following this line of argument, space is not the third dimension, but the fourth. Space is a derivative of time. Space is 4D. This is not a philosophical exercise, although this thinking finds much resonance with the philosophy of Deleuze, whose work has been used in various contexts to create a framework for experimentation and exploration in this field. Yet I would like to address this proposition on a very practical level. When we regard the narrative level in a moving image as the programme (its logic, its cause etc.) of its design, then the creation of its structure would follow the instructions that are generated from this. But if we generate the instructions on the basis of some other structure, a previous or distant structure, then the narrative would follow that structure. A narrative in architecture places action in space. The amount of movement or specific use of the space and the demands of the user determine the usability of the space. In cinema we do the opposite. Time is inhabited by the “user”. Motions sculpt space on the basis of the demands of the programme (the narratives). This is not just a reversal of outside-in to inside-out or any of those kinds of conceptions; this is a fundamental reversal of concept. In order to “flatten” the field of options and to be able to work with these notions on a comprehensible level, I propose that architecture writes time through space and cinema writes space through time. This is a reversal of the space-time axis.8 This means that the quintessential quality of a moving image lies in the concept of the production of space through time, rather than the other way around. Within the studios and during lectures (especially when working with architecture students) I have encountered the problematic of clarifying this concept, not because of any uncertainty of the concept of space and its possible manifestations (whether these remain virtual, or become actualised), but the real problem lies in the very rigid and narrow vision students have on the concept of time. The general perception is that time is time: no more, no less. It is an entity with one direction, one unit of measurement, unbeatably

thorough in its capacity to progress in a steady fashion, and—perhaps most importantly—dissectible into small units.

Avatarism Rather than starting from this angle (in an attempt to overthrow the dissectible concept of time) I began by making a classification of how time appears to us, focusing on the question of what time does, rather than the question of what time is. For this I searched for a language that could function in the practical realm of moving image production, and be used in a metaphorical or even metaphysical context. For this I would distinguish a static/dynamic dualism and a linear/non-linear polarity, which could be put into this type of axial scheme:

LINEAR

STATIC --------------- I --------------- DYNAMIC NON-LINEAR

The position of the static and non-linear is called aion, which is time before its unfolding, before its actualisation in some type of chronology. Philosopher John Mullarkey explains: Deleuze talks of the paradox of the present as the need for a time in which to constitute or synthesise time (as the succession of past, present, and future): “there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur”. This time, moreover, cannot be time understood as succession, as change or tensed, for this would just bring us back to the question of how and where such a time was constituted, how did it flow. Rather, it is empty, the time of eternity—what Deleuze calls the Virtual or Aion.9

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On the basis of the deliberations and motivations mentioned above I have now defined eight avatars of time: (i) Volume (not duration), (ii) Significance (intensity), (iii) Necessity (instrumental or social), (iv) Sequence (order), (v) Bearing (heading and speed), (vi) Indexicality (now, then, when), (vii) Simultaneity and (viii) Proximity (relative distance of timescales). The appearances (avatars) of time are only perceivable in the dynamic and linear sense; they leave out the condition of aion. All these categories fall under the axiomatic position of linear, dynamic time. Within this “group” we can differentiate three sub-groups, which will not be formalised in any way as it serves no purpose to over-classify these notions. However, it is helpful to cluster some of them to relate to their “provenance”; with this I mean to what degree it could be claimed that they “descended” from either chronos (measurable time) or kairos (lived time). We can then see four “types” of avatars emerging; those that are rooted in the physicality of time, those are rooted in the motion of time, those are grounded in the experience of time, and finally those that are founded in the relativity of times. How these classes work and relate to each other will be made clear through the description of all eight separately. 1. Voluminosity Volume of time is arguably the most “chronologic” of them all, as this would indicate “how much time” we perceive. But, as we already made the assumption that time never appears as a sole element of chronos, we could not translate this to “how long this time takes”; volume does not equal duration, in the same way as mass does not equal weight. The volume of time is conditional and a product, or better, a residue, of the conditional duration of time. An analogy can be found in the difference between air and wind: we can measure the flow, but not the amount of physical particles that move. The progression and direction of time produces a duration (that can vary under different conditions) and can only be measured in hindsight. It is like shaving foam coming out of

an aerosol canister: the flow, direction and shape will be determined by the local conditions (angle of gravitational pull, possible obstructions, pressure in the can, viscosity—and therefore temperature etc.), only once it is out there, in its crystallised appearance, can we define its ultimate volume. And this is how we should interpret the volume of time; under stable conditions it is measurable through its flow, its duration, but as we do not know what the local conditions are, we can only determine the exact volume in hindsight. 2. Indexicality A second category that is rooted in the “physicality” of time deals with the indexicality of time, or rather, indexicality as a point on the progression of time. This concept has a simple part and a complex part. The easy one is that of the clock. This relatively primitive machine has the prerogative to indicate “how late it is” and “how much time has passed”, and even if it is driven by the motion in an atom, it is of a fundamental different order than time itself. Firstly, it is good to realise that the naming of hours is highly, if not completely, arbitrary. Nothing would happen to the world at large if we decided to switch to an 84.7-hour-day system instead of the 24-hour system. The time measuring system has been devised to approximate the duration of the day cycle and this is far from flawless, and again, only usable under highly defined conditions. Put the same clock on the moon and all rational connection to its environment is lost. And clearly its measurement of the progression of time is not in any way connected to the real progression of time, it does not “feel” something when a second has passed as a basis for moving its arms, in fact, it is the moving of the arm that indicates that a certain moment has passed. But, as much of the other conditions are also unknown (the volume of time, the effect of local conditions and so forth), it does not really matter that the instrument is crude and imperfect, we can still make appointments on the basis of the information provided by

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the clock, we can still put a cake in the oven for a certain duration of time. It becomes more complex if we incorporate its expression in kairos, because then we need to take into account the entire complexity of the local conditions and the assemblage of the system. Note that “local” does not only literally refers to physical geographical conditions, but also to the notion that there will always be specific differences in whatever situation we investigate, which include mental, social, physical, economic and (seemingly contradictory) temporal differences. The consequence of this is that we can never speak of experiencing time in the same way, ultimately leading to different timescales for the same duration. In this sense, the indexical component becomes more reliable than the seemingly more objective measurement of time: it is after all often quite possible to determine when the time has come, but impossible to quantify the interval needed to move from position x (the moment of departure) to position y (the moment when it is time). The indexical value of time is under certain conditions far more important than the “chronological” time. This avatar can be seen as the completion of a certain volume of time. Regardless of the flow (the speed of time), there comes a moment when any given volume is met, therefore I have classified this alongside the volume of time. Yet the volume itself is not determined by the indexicality. Of a different order are appearances of the bearing and order in time, and both concepts are obviously heavily connected to the production of moving images. 3. Directionality Previously I have made a classification in terms of static and non-static time and the introduction of a segregation of linear and non-linear time. For 10. Pseudomorphic refers to a shape that appears to be different than it actually is (for instance, the reflection of an echo indicating a warship, while in fact it reflects the presence of a whale, or the Japanese Hashima Island, whose silhouette resembles that of a warship so much that is has been torpedoed several times

this following section it is paramount to be aware that this taxonomy solely deals with dynamic and linear time. One could say that dynamic time is in need of a direction, i.e. linearity, to be rendered actual. A common view is the understanding of time in analogy with the central perspective; we conceive time as single lines that converge in the past, or as the ancient Greek proverb goes “we walk backwards into the future”, which is also the basis of the modernist worldview; the extrapolation of a linear view of the past into a linear future. Consequentially, logic dictates that if something moves, it moves in a certain direction: one could only speak of this movement through its (temporary) course and therefore heading. This seems rather guileless; as soon as we know its velocity and bearing, we can start to calculate its course. Yet how does such a system behave if this movement were idle, returning to the same position, for instance, in a circular or elliptical figure. If the movement would be progressively curved—like spiralling in- or outwards—it would imply that anything moving on that line would never be in the same position more than once, yet it would be subjected to a continuous revisiting of angles and relative position towards its pivotal point. As for example in the stroboscopic effect, an element might appear to be in a stable position, but this is only because its movement is disguised by the effect of a stroboscopic light. It would be imperative to investigate alternative modes of perception. Part of this could involve rethinking if whatever is being perceived is only explicable through the notion of simple linearity, or whether in fact a more complex system could be active, such as anamorphic, pseudomorphic or morphomorphic systems.10 I have no answer to what implications that would have on our understanding of the direction of time, but I think it is justifiable to consider the possibility of looking at (the progression of) time through different systems than we have done so far. during World War II. Morphomorphic means the ability for a system or an organ to adapt to a form, yet its actual form is in fact shapeless or irrelevant (like the casting of a shadow of a cloud).

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11. George Simondon coined the term “transduction”: “For the process of transduction to occur, there must by some disparity, discontinuity or mismatch within a domain; two different forms or potentials whose disparity can be modulated. Transduction is a process whereby a disparity or a difference is topologically and temporally restructured across some interface. It mediates different organizations of energy.” See Mackenzie, Adrian. Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London: Continuum. 2002. p. 25. 12. Hawking, Stephen and Mlodinow, Leonard. A Briefer History of Time. New York, NY: Bantam Publishers, 2005. pp. 48-49.

4. Sequentiality The fourth avatar of time is closely connected to the progression and the direction of time: it deals with the sequences and orders of events. This automatically draws two issues into the equation. The first is the necessity to incorporate all the mentioned “counterassumptions” into the question on what exact direction we want to apply to the notion of order; after all, if we adopt a different “time perspective” we could find a completely new definition on the direction of time. The second issue is that of causality, which causes us to move, on very slippery grounds. The prerogative of “firstness” (that which happens first) in relation to the “truth” and “ownership” has its roots in the central perspective of time: in fact it is an assumption that is conditional for the system to function. The logic of cause and effect needs to be anchored in the intrinsic security that that which has happened remains “happened”. Reality is far more complex than that. In affect theory the figure and ground principle does not apply; figure and ground are interchangeable positions, or consequently non-existent. Affect precedes affection: it is the creation of a charged environment that allows for interaction, transduction, perception and affection.11 A consequence of this reasoning is that causality can never be seen as a local event, yet it can manifest itself locally. This becomes immediately clear when we look at the notion of information, which, in my definition, is the pivotal point between the virtual and the actualised; it is—for lack of a better phrase—the exchange node between both realms. The closed concept to causality that can deal with these notions

is that of non-local causality. Non-local causality recognises the input of information as a cause, yet this will manifest itself in respect to its effect. This allows for a much wider range of effects and causes, which might not be directly and locally connected, yet they can manifest themselves that way. Non-local causality is very important for the understanding of the fourth of the avatars of time: the sequentiality of time, meaning the order in which situations occur, the sequence of events. It seems fairly simple to classify events on the basis of their chronological hierarchy; event one precedes event two, therefore event two cannot influence event one. Again, this vision is grounded in the tradition of central perspective, of what happens first stays first. Yet this view is losing support, surprisingly especially among historians. There is a growing belief that history should not be seen as a fixed grid in which all that ever was has a predetermined place. As theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking remarks: Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time—and in turn the curvature of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect, but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe. Just as we cannot talk about events in the universe without the notions of space and time, so in general relativity it became meaningless to talk about space and time outside the limits of the universe.12

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In this there is much need for alternative chronologies. The canonical view of timelines, in which the essential elements are woven together by a web of causal logic, is losing support. 5. Simultaneity There is a growing awareness that reality—present, future and past—is far too complex to arrange along the crude and simplifying lines of causality and interdependencies. Instead, one should recognise the numerous occasions at which events unfolded simultaneously, or situations in which there were contradicting movements of which only one is seen as relevant. There are also situations in which the importance and relevance was only assigned afterwards, while those involved in the actual event (could have) had no clue of its role in history. This is not even including deliberate or unintentional exclusion of information, which would cast a complete and potentially reversing light on a given action or event. This is why the mantra “you cannot change the future, but you can change the past” is, despite its simplicity, so truly profound. Information (as the pivotal point between the actualised and the virtual) has the potential (infoduction) to dramatically change our entire history, as this history is built on the belief in a single-file chronology and canonical relevancy. A single line of text such as “I am not your biological father” can change someone’s entire personal history. All and everything they have ever taken for being the history of their personal relationships is jeopardised, or even permanently destroyed by this very small bundle of information. This entails the recognition of fact, without the connotations of interdependencies, meaning that although the actuality of the fact might be painful and emotionally destabilising, the event is seen as a separate string of elements, grounded and belonging in another chronology, namely the personal history of someone else, not one’s own. This, of course, demands a very strong and stable mental image of that concept, maybe an almost “religious” belief

in that construct. It supposes an unrelatedness of events in “different timelines” to such degree that even the simultaneous unfolding of those would not be seen as interfering, and although this might appear to be belonging to a very peculiar and uncommon mental condition, rather the opposite seems to be true. Any category of cognitive dissonance, conceptual dislocatedness and emotional non-connectedness seems to have its grounding in this concept, causing the endless stream of mental and physical abuse, racism, hierarchical misuse, moral injustice and pure criminal behaviour that has been part of the chronology of humanity itself. It seems to be an asset that can be applied and denied at the same time. It is the contrasting position of non-local causality: local non-causality. This explains why there is no separate category for this type of parallel unfolding: it is the negative position of one that is already listed. The direction of time is connected through the notion of causality, to non-local causality, to local non-causality, to sequencing. 6. Proximity So far this has only been mentioned in respect to the unfolding of different times within the realm of one type of speed of time. It is now high time to consider unfoldings of different speeds, only related to each other by a physical closeness and not by a shared chronology. The supposition I will be making here is not that there are different speeds in the unfolding of time—that would be a possibility in a different model which I am not addressing here. The system that is central here supposes that different objects, materials, organisms, non-organisms, in fact everything known today deals with the same unit of time objectively. This means that there is no difference in the objective ageing or emerging of matter in any of the mentioned structures. Yet there is significant difference in what I would call the relative effect of time on that element. If we look at

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13. With “unweight taxonomy” I mean a classification that has no hierarchy in its componential “weight”. For instance a safe with its key; 99,999% of its volume, mass and structure will be in the safe, yet the key is equally important for the system to work. This asymmetry lies at the heart of understanding dynamic systems theories. 14. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence; An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013. p. 23. 15. Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis. Indiana, IN: Indiana University Press. 1992. p. 135.

the half-life time of different elements or bodies, it becomes immediately clear that there is a very large dissimilarity in how the progression of time would affect the various complexities or simplicities. If we would compare a clump of metal (iron, for instance) and a piece of wood (oak, for instance) then the difference in “life expectancy” is significant. So if we would look for a synchronisation of lifetimes (as opposed to timelines), then we would get a completely altered perceptual field with regards to the perception of time: we would have to group objects and elements on the basis of their relative position in their “lives”, which means that all concepts of “older” and “younger” would instantly be rendered ridiculous. A 90-year-old oak would be younger than a 60-year-old man, a 20-hour-old mayfly would be older than a 70-year-old turtle, and so on. These types of timescales are still operational within the comprehensible domain of humans, and the mere recognition of their existence makes one hungry for more. To exemplify this among architecture students, I often use the notion of horizontality. When we are engaged in a design process, an essential assumption is that the surfaces we build are flat, the lines we draw are straight and the angles we work with are (often) perpendicular. Yet, it does not take much imagination to see that if we would draw a line long enough, it would bend with the curvature of the earth, the surfaces would even bend in all directions, creating a dome-like structure and all the straight angles would in fact convex towards outer space and converge towards the centre of the earth. Everyone knows this, and yet we are able to live, work, build and design with the notion of “flatness” as a fun-

damental element of our environment. Apparently this system does not have to be univocal and scale-less to be workable, and perhaps that goes for more systems. This is what I mean with the reversal of knowledge; that what we can control is perceived as knowledge, although we cannot explain how it relates to that what is unknown; all that is unknown is perceived as speculation, although we can state with certainty that what we “know” does not align with that. Both systems are based on division, exclusion and hierarchy and it is my strong belief that the reductions made in and by these systems are far more speculative than any systematic that refuses to follow that road. Any system that fronts relationality as the only “essential” quality (note that the vocabulary automatically reduces the concept; essential does not exist as such, as it is the relation between bodies that is the smallest denominator), any system that starts from flat ontology and “unweight” taxonomy, is far more realistic than any of the reductionist positions.13 System is used here as a foundation of another mental model; inevitably the ultimate consequence of this reasoning is that there is no separate system possible, all systems are part of another system, thus rendering the notion of system useless. This is why we prefer to speak of ecologies and assemblages as that which can—to a certain extent—be isolated for observation, yet as all bodies in an assemblage are always also part of other assemblages, this isolation is only hypothetical. Is that not the same as any other reductionism one might ask at this point? Sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour comments:

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The question is not as idle as one might think, if we remember that the adventure of these last three centuries can be summed up by the story—yes, I admit it, the Master Narrative—of a double displacement: from economy to ecology. Two forms of familiar habitats, oikos: we know that the first is uninhabitable and the second not yet ready for us! The whole world has been forced to move into “The Economy”, which we now know is only a utopia— or rather a dystopia, something like the opium of the people.14 Despite the doubtfulness of transitioning from one system to another, it is my belief that this is not even a matter of choice. If anything has become clear in the last two centuries, it would be that politics cannot be isolated, not be stratified into some type of “objective” arena that has no direct attachments to the actuality of smallness and individuality. Felix Guattari warns: Psychoanalysis, institutional analysis, film, literature, poetry, innovative pedagogies, town planning and architecture—all the disciplines will have to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon, and transform them into riches and unforeseen pleasures, the promises of which, for all that, are all too tangible.15 The proximity of timescales borders on the previously mentioned speculation on the existence of different entities living “in between” the world as we know it, simply by having a completely different referential time unit (or the reverse, where we have a much faster timescale than something else, therefore we cannot see that), with the addition that this has not to be seen as some type esoteric endeavour. When we look at the built environment, it is rather obvious that this is not a pre-given condition and that its reality (both virtual and actualised) is subject to constant change. Structures are rendered obsolete,

constructions overhauled, expanded or demolished, buildings erected and torn down, usages changed or upgraded and social structures emerge, become redundant or are rejected, altered and modified. The city as we know it, as a place of solidity and rigid structure does not exist, we just live too fast to see it move. The instrument to register this is, of course, the camera which, by working with time-lapse, stop motion or sped up, can render these movements perfectly visible. A slightly abstract exemplification of this is found in the work Sehnsucht (2002) by the Dutch artist Jeroen Eisinga, which shows the decomposition of a dead zebra in a surrealist environment. He filmed and sped up the footage in such a way that the zebra appears to be breathing or at least moving, although quite the opposite is true. All kinds of other things are alive (rats, insects, maggots, bacteria etc.) except for the zebra itself. If we were to film a city for 35 years (about half a human lifetime), and speed that recording up to cover only half an hour, we would obviously see the movement of the city very clearly. This is all that is meant by the proximity of timescales, and that is all but abstruse. We are already faced with a number of problems caused by systems and industries that no longer exist, and that number will only increase. Think of chemical or nuclear waste and instruments of warfare that include toxic, biological and nuclear components. All the effects of industrial processes and infrastructure in terms of production (demolition of natural habitats, exhaustion of resources, direct pollution), markets (exclusion of alternatives, elimination of pre-industrial organisation), and consumption (waste, overconsumption, fresh water issues, inequality). We can easily see that the timelines of these problems are much longer than our own. A city like Amsterdam, for instance, faces environmental issues on a daily basis, which have their origin in industries that have long been extinct: the inner city still has sections polluted by the industry of the eighteenth century, while along the perimeter of the heart of the city much pollution has been found that is the result of gas production facilities of the nineteenth century, and in certain

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16. McLuhan, Marshal. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge. 2005 [1964].

areas a plethora of polluting elements can be found caused by former shipbuilding, car assembly and oil processing industries, which all ceased to exist in the last 50 years. In other words, we have surrounded ourselves with timelines that are much larger than we can oversee, and that has caused us to lose ownership of said problems. Necessity and cause are two different entities, their connection only rendered legible at the moments of morphogenesis, territorialising and coding. In the formation of any (metaphorical) shape (morphogenesis) the difference between cause and necessity can only be determined from the perspective of either the state before, or the state after this formation (in retrospect). Seen from the perspective of “the shape”, certain elements are necessary to come to said shape, yet seen from the perspective of the elements the shape can only be perceived as caused by their presence as it cannot be known what is necessary to form said shape before its very existence. In this interplay causality and necessity “battle” over this perspective, claiming the territory of their effects in the chain of events. This territorialisation of perspective is expressed in the semiotic domain as forms of coding, in which, for instance, denotations and connotations alter place in the semiotic chain of events and meaning. In the context of the proximity of timescales the difference between necessity and cause can only be defined on the basis of the perspective of one or the other timescale. In the one timescale one could be looking into the future (cause) of the other, while simultaneously looking into the past (necessity) of the other.

7. Requirement The seventh and eighth avatars of time—significance (how valuable) and requirement (what is needed)—might be seen as existing linear to each other as well as parallel. To start with the linear, the first phase could be that the requirement of time is the amount of time that must pass (or not) to reach a certain goal. Very physical examples can be found in any situation in which only a restricted amount of physical matter is able to move from A to B per second. For instance, when filling up the car at a petrol station, or the amount of electric current that can pass through a copper wire of a certain diameter. These amounts of time that must be invested to reach a certain outcome are classifiable objectively; if the water tap passes x litres of water per minute, and I need to fill a 10-litre bucket, then it will take 10/x minutes to fill that bucket. The reverse logic is also very measurable and could be called objective in that sense. If a certain type of food deteriorates within five days to a level below the edible threshold it needs to be discarded. In some cases these two lines need to be in conjunction with each other to lead to a certain (desired) outcome. A soufflé needs to be in the oven not too long, but not too short either, otherwise it will not have the desired consistency. Biology is full of such balances: in many zoological processes there are designated timeframes, windows of opportunity for certain behaviour or acts based on the balance between too long and not long enough. This is exactly why we have to be careful with naming this approach “objective”: none of the processes above are described fully without explicit

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reservation on conditionality being made. Flow of liquid also depends on many other factors than time alone, such as pressure, temperature, viscosity, and all other forces that come with the material it is surrounded by. Even the most precise description of such a system is not capable of dealing with all these elements, and can therefore only approximate the actual situation.

be that not all of the components need to be there, or in any perceptible amount. The outcome of such a process indicates only the contingent obligation to reach that particular state, making that state a destination that could be reached through different roads.

8. Significance

In the end it is the relevance in respect to the main questioning in this essay that caused the formulation of this taxonomy of perceptions of time. As indicated, this process started from discussions with students on ways of editing their audiovisual products and the montage of their work, but slowly it grew bigger than is needed for that purpose. This classification of time is very helpful as some type of ruler applied to different types of media, and their behaviour. In analogy with Marshall McLuhan’s system of hot and cold media that classifies types according to their ability to contain and release information, we could use the avatars of time to classify the way they handle, absorb, release, convert and modify perceptions of time.16 The eight avatars of time are a system for investigating media capacities, both in the conscious and non-conscious realms, and it produces a shadow of reasonable doubt on most of the existing epistemologies of time itself.

The second phase in this linear sense of aligning the avatars requirement and significance, is to observe the time that is needed in a non-objective way, similar to the reasoning followed above. The definition of the significance avatar could be the time needed to reach a desired level of communication, affective transfer or critical mass in a decision-making process. Obviously this works three ways again: there is both a minimum and maximum amount of time and a precise amount of time. In contrast to the “objective” approach in the requirement, the determining elements for building the thresholds in these equations lie in the realm of perception, and might therefore be considered less precise or even trivial compared to the hard components of the exterior, such as those mentioned in the requirement section. As we deal with the eight avatars of time as ways of learning through perceiving time, not as a mode of investigating the nature of time directly or descriptively, it is in fact this mode that might be far more precise than any of the others. This mode operates on the boundary between perceiving and knowing, albeit not in a descriptive fashion. It is not learning by doing, it is not the learning that results from a couple of cycles of trial and error. It truly deals with knowledge that is accumulated itself, as a result of many elements, including all “hard” facts, all previous knowledge and all intuitive inputs combined. This is not a linear process, and it is certainly not a logic of necessity: it could well

Conclusion

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PARSE Journal

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Save the Date EXCLUSION: 2nd Biennial PARSE Conference

its administrative “doing”? Histories of modernism suggest that

15-17 November 2017, Gothenburg, Sweden

this refusal and/or resistance a survival mechanism, and a per-

creative practitioners are managed and at the same time resist – or refuse to take responsibility for – their own management. Is formative critique of the governmentalisation and privatisation

How does exclusion operate at a local, national and interna-

of the cultural industries, or is it a naïve calling upon culture’s

tional level both within the arts, in education and within cultural

possessive autonomy – a resistance in fact to the responsibility

production more generally? How does one get to imagine

of care of the self within an administered world?

oneself as an artist of any discipline - in terms of race, class

Topics covered are: the self-management of artistic media

and access to education? Within the arts, how can we improve

personas, the double management of heritage and biennales,

access to learning and the formation of experience – and what

the need for a more managed society, how feminist readings

can we model from other disciplines in this respect? What

of domestic and maintenance work could be used to subjectify

are the politics of access? Do strategies and infrastructures of

administration, and more. Contributors include Khaldun Bshara,

inclusion simply replicate and reinforce individualised imaginaries

Carla Cruz, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Barbara Czarniawska,

within broadly hierarchical social structures, particularly as artistic

Mark Fisher, Andrea Franke and Ross Jardine, Karin Hansson,

habits of production are increasingly exported as economised

Adelheid Mers, Apolonija Šušteršič and Dari Bae. Publication

knowledge production to other parts of the world?

Spring 2017.

Both within and far beyond the field of cultural production, people are excluded from territorial, subjective, environmental and imaginative spaces, be they national or virtual. The weight

About Peer-Review

of the world, as Pierre Bourdieu would have it, is slighted

PARSE Journal employs a peer review process that is designed in

against the vast majority of people living upon it. What forms of

order to: (i) establish suitability for publication in terms of content,

research and which actions can be taken within the artistic and

relevance and quality; and (ii) provide critical feedback to enable

pedagogical environment that hold open spaces of contact

contributors to finalise material for publication. Each contribution

and forms of rights?

submitted to PARSE Journal is reviewed by at least three readers

The PARSE conference on exclusion welcomes individual and

in the pre-publication process: a member of the editorial team for

collective proposals on the theme of exclusion from all disciplines.

the particular issue number (the article editor); a member of the

As well as the arts (visual art, design, performance, music, archi-

editorial board; and an external reader.

tecture, craft, etc.), we are particularly interested to learn from the

The peer review process is based on an open review

social sciences, natural sciences, law, medicine as well as from

process (it is not double blind as normally employed in many

the professional sphere. We welcome proposals for presentation

of the natural sciences for example). The full list of reviewers

nodes and are interested in all forms of presentation.

will be identified via the PARSE website annually. In all cases

A detailed call for the conference, with deadlines for

reviewers and authors will be asked to disclose any possible

abstracts etc., will be circulated in November 2016. As part of

conflict of interest. After approval for publication has been

the PARSE Dialogue series, an open workshop on ideas and

established through the peer review process, a finalised version

practices related to the topic of Exclusion will be held at Valand

of the contribution will be provided by the author(s) in corre-

Academy on Wednesday 16 November 2016 - all welcome.

spondence with the article editor.

Please contact parse@konst.gu.se with inquiries.

We regret, that it is not possible for the editorial team to enter into dialogue or provide feedback for all submissions. Typically this is reserved for those submissions that have been identified as

PARSE Journal Issue 5: Management

suitable for potential publication in the particular volume number.

The Parse journal issue on Management asks: How does a

PARSE Journal accepts proposals for publication on a rolling

political and social separation of the tasks of “making” and

basis and potential contributors are invited to consider the

“managing” inhere to an isolationist mechanism in creative

open calls for material published on the PARSE Journal website:

practice, in which production is separated from its processes of

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PARSE Journal

University of Gothenburg ISSN 2002-0511