Tele-Spatial Research

Media technologies and economies increasingly distort the familiar relationship between time and space that is the present. Time must now be recognized as the dominant dimension in this continuum, since the accounting of time increasingly directs our lifestyles and configures our relationship to space. Consequently, the roles of maps and visual representations of space are under stress as new temporal systems begin to change our way of navigating through and understanding the places we inhabit.

Bells, whistles and ticks of clocks have escorted us through schooling and smoothly into the workplace. Our submission to these devices represents the depth of embodiment of clock time, which goes much deeper than the maps and plans that describe our spaces of ownership. I have attempted to explore this modern condition in a number of projects that manipulate the language of space and time using a vocabulary of clocks, rulers, speed limits and architecture.

The first is an architectural project that was developed and employed in Edinburgh for Norton Park (Fig. 2), a three-story building in which time is the primary tool for navigating through the space of the building. Upon entering the business center, concentric circles centered within the floor of the reception area eventually radiate up the corridors and throughout the entire building. Each circle or arc denotes the amount of time derived from an average walking speed that it takes to travel its distance from the center. Thus, the receptionist does not refer to a map or provide spatial directions, but instead simply tells people how to get to specific rooms by telling them where the office is in time. Consequently, the inhabitants of this place find themselves conceiving and navigating through it in time rather than space.

The digital art piece Looking Clock represents an alternative to delivering time and ultimately to moving between lived time and universal time--or the moment and the instant. Very simply, it is an analog clock that only continues to work and reveal the time while a person is present and looking at it. Once a person moves away from it, the clock's movement stops immediately. However, as soon as another person approaches it, it restarts and quickly catches up with universal time.

Traditional clocks impose a structure on the world because they don't know we exist and continue to march onwards to a universal beat. By contrast, the Looking Clock only reveals the time within the presence of a human subject. This suggests that while the "time of the world" is actualized within the instant of reading this time, a space is made prior to this for a "time of the soul."

In the process of observing the hands of the Looking Clock move to catch up with conventional time, we experience time between the past and the present--an otherwise impossible phenomenon with a clock that is always functioning in the present. In this moment we acknowledge the present in relation to history and future as the difference between the two time references.

Both pieces of work represent an ongoing investigation into the stresses upon our vocabulary and models for challenging our experience of time and space, particularly as new media technologies continue to question the traditional. This field of study can be described as tele-spatial research.

Chris Speed, CAiiA-STAR (Centre for Science, Technology & Art Research-Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts), School of Computing, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA, U.K. E-mail: <chriss@soc.plym.ac.uk>.

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