Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

1 | Experimenting with Time

17 one exPerImentIng wIth tIme Consider a late-model car. It is a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can date it component by component: this part was invented at the turn of the century, another ten years ago, and Carnot’s cycle is almost two hundred years old. Not to mention that the wheel dates back to Neolithic times. The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it. Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time In serres’s descrIPtIon of the late-model car, we see an image of presentness constituted by a drawing together, or assemblage of, what he terms “the pleats of time.” In essence this is a multi-temporal assemblage, taking form in the present. The object of the late-model car emerges from an aggregate of solutions from different periods in history . The aggregate of solutions, gathered together as though the pleats of a curtain, provides the condition from which the present object—and the present moment in general—becomes. What is important here is not the material object of the late-model car but rather the processes that it embodies, and the way that the object draws together once disparate moments in time into a field of multi-temporality. For Serres, the object or the image, whether it’s a car, a book, a thought, or a memory, and likewise every moment in time, is always multi-temporal or polychronic as, just like the late-model car, it is made up of an aggregate of solutions, concepts or problems originating from different historical eras. Multi-temporal time is a scalar type of time, a type of time where multiple temporalities are overlaid in the present. It has quantity, thick with its multiple temporal episodes, but not a single linear direction. It is instead a mode of temporality in which the present moment, the point 18 Time and the Digital at which we receive aesthetic information and interact with technology, takes into itself multiple scales of the past. This chapter explores several experimental artworks from artists such as Dennis Del Favero, Janet Cardiff, Omer Fast, and the artist group Blast Theory. I describe these works as experimental first because they experiment with technology, applying it outside of its conventional use, and second because they experiment aesthetically with concepts of time and temporality. By investigating the temporality expressed by these works, I hope to provide some introductory examples of the overlay of digital and physical processes that may be seen to generate, in a similar manner to Serres’s car, a multi-temporal type of time. In this process the notion of convergence is central, a notion which, it must be said, has received substantial attention in new media circles, although this has tended to be based around spatial concepts. For instance, Lev Manovich describes the way in which new media overlays social reality by citing a convergence of actual and “virtual” spaces.1 Shaun Moores has likewise pointed out that digitally mediated communication provides for a doubling of space,2 and Phil Graham has explored the economy of owning cyberspace.3 If we are to think of the digital in terms of time, we first need to overcome the tendency to spatialize the process of interaction with digital systems. It is quite common to associate interaction with ideas about space; as pointed out in the Introduction, we need only look at popular idioms associated with the digital. For instance, when we access the Internet we are told that we enter a “cyberspace,” in which we visit Web “sites,” and when we communicate over this network we are said to initiate a convergence of once separate spaces. We imagine ourselves existing in a network of interconnected nodes, having the capability to be in two places at once. We can also see this in examples of off-line interaction. For instance, interactive art in Mixed Reality (MR) spaces has previously been explained as an overlay of space, a placing of the spectator in the image space of illusion, so that the image and the spectator exist in the same immersive space.4 It seems that since William Gibson’s conception of cyberspace and McLuhan’s concept of the global village, metaphors of space have dominated the discourse surrounding new media. These have been bolstered by theories of aesthetics based on the notion of a textual or aesthetic...