As Slow as Possible? On the Machinic (Non-)Sense of the Sonic Present and Digital Indifference toward Time

INTRODUCING TEMPOR(E)AL SONICITY

To unthink time is impossible for human intuition, but it can nonetheless be achieved by switching to the technomathematical perspective of machines. Ontological reflection on time has long been a central domain of philosophy, art, and poetry in cultural history. But once the discursive vocabulary of time is replaced by corresponding technical terms, the totalizing terms of this cultural history implode into a delicate multitude of differential operations. In this regard, contemporary appeals to slowness in the arts may productively be replaced by technomathematical termini technici such as the delta-t for signal delay, where even storage media have less to do with temporal endurance than with suspended channels of coded transmission.

From the media-archaeological point of view (in contrast to phenomenology), electronic media posit a quantitative rather than affective difference between the kinds of timescales that appeal to the inner time consciousness of humans, such as "slow" or "fast." In terms of Digital Signal Processing, a high or low tone is not primarily processed in temporal terms as wave form but according to numerical frequencies. Slowness thus becomes purely a metaphor when applied to the technological sense of time. Joseph Fourier's implicitly "sonic" analysis of vibrational events in his 1822 Théorie analytique de la chaleur (The Analytical Theory of Heat) made the temporality of world-signals symbolically calculable that, in cold calculation, allows for electroacoustic manipulation. In the computation of sound, what appears as "time," stretching to human perception, is nothing else but the discrete operations of numbers.

THE SLOWNESS OF ACOUSTIC SIGNALS AND THE AURAL SENSE OF TIME

The privileged human sense for time-critical perception is binaural hearing, where interaural differences arise because of the relatively slow signal propagation of sound through the air; a microtemporal interval arises from the different moments a stimulus arrives at one ear and then at the other. The slow signal run time of acoustic waves even led to the reversal of the cause-effect relation of combat noise in technological warfare—reversed time. When in World War II a German A4 rocket hit London, the acoustic articulation of its approach already lagged behind the destructive event itself. No longer was danger announced in advance; the sonic barrier had been broken.

Sound as mechanical vibration is slow a priori compared to visual presence, which is based on a higher frequency of electromagnetic waves. The speed of light results in an almost immediate live signal transmission, whereas acoustic sensation—based on a slower run time in mechanically elastic matter—becomes recognizable as a time-event. From that slowness, the phenomenal sense of time arises. A machine, though, has no inherent understanding of sound, which is a phenomenological category only for animals. An operative digital mechanism only knows implicitly sonic timing to the extent that it consists of rhythms, pulses, and numerical frequencies, just as analog recording media "know" time signals.

UNDERSTANDING SLOWNESS: HARMONICAL ANALYSIS AND THE LIMITS OF THE ORGAN

A recording medium registers movement with indifference. For example, Louis Daguerre's early long-time exposure photography of Boulevard du Temple in Paris resulted in an almost humanless scene, and Hiroshi Sugimoto's long-time exposure photographies of movies resulted in the pure white noise of the theater screen. A less phenomenal but more technoepistemic form of slowing down sound is its mathematical analysis, where the focus is not on musical content of sound as a cultural aesthetic form, but rather on its medium message as a time signal. In the mathematical field of Harmonic Analysis, complicated periodic motions can be reduced to sums of simple oscillations, which can be characterized either according to frequency (which makes them numerically computable) or according to duration in time. In this way, the transcendent category of "time" itself can be replaced by the analytic knowledge of processual being or events.

The acronym of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, ASAP, may play on the bureaucratic idiom "as soon as possible," yet it can also be recast...