time drills

DEEP TIME RAPID TIME EXERCISES by Spurse

INTRODUCTION

One of the early Greek philosophers, Heraclitus, claimed, “You can never step in the same river twice,” to which a beguiling paradox appeared, “You can never step in the same river once.”

Heraclitus’s words suggest a profound realization that our logics about time matter, but in what way? Yes, time passes, and yes, everything changes. So what? What should we make of this? What futures will be made from this? Climate change. Tipping points. Evolutionary systems. Emergence. Culture. Each of these futures forms from a deeply inherent logic about time and produces its own politics, its own practices, and its own outcomes. So, yes, everything changes, but how? Why? What is changing? A thing? A subjectivity? A process? A system? At what speeds and trajectories do these change? Hourly? Seasonally? Sequentially? Stochastically? But perhaps more critically to something we call qualitative time, with what tools do we sense/engage these changes? How do we shift from rehashing hollow truisms about time and change, to inventing robust experimentations that arouse change?

Paradoxical wit is not enough. We simply cannot be only in the momentary and passing present, this much is clear. Not when we are part of the production of new time-spaces and futures. Not when we have pushed ourselves, and our worlds, far into the future, far beyond our selves. Indeed, the question of time today is not simply one of a general philosophical curiosity. In an interview, Gilles Deleuze warned against aimless rumination when he said, “People do not take into account how the PLO had to invent a space-time in the Arab world.” This is something of great interest. Our actions are not just in time or in a container called space, but they coproduce new times—new space-times. There is then a dynamic lived history to time. We are of time, of space-time.

Pushing this further, how do we make sense of these new forms of time—that we have invented, and that have invented us—when they are rapidly reconfiguring our world far ahead of our abilities to engage with them? Let us take apart an example of what we mean: uranium. Now that we have moved it out of the earth and into our techno-ecologies (our anthropogenic biomes), we have something that will be active for hundreds of millions of years. This form of deep time—hundreds of millions of years—is a staggering conception of time, as it contrasts with human recorded history of only thousands of years. This is not the only new form of space-time that we have produced—there are quite a few. We argue that new space-times are co-emerging and being developed all the time, so it is not simply a question of being attentive to these new forms or what they ask of us.

Inventing The Present

To move from this, we must question what is at stake in the way we have conceptualized the present. Consider that our basic ethical concepts are grounded in direct face-to-face situations located in the present. Given new space-times such as our uranium example—forms of time that exceed on all possible levels the human—what then becomes of our ethical disposition? (Let us be clear here: We do not have an answer to this question. Nor are we suggesting that you should. But rather, we are curious about how we even go about being interested in these new deepspacetimes.) In response to these general questions and worries about the speed of change today, we hear around us phrases such as “Be in the moment,” or “The present is all that is real.” But our present moment is now a thick, dense, complex, and multiple present. If we can make time shifts such as uranium that fold forward millions of years, should we not also invent a radically dynamic and engaging sense of our present? Should we not reinvent what it means to be of time and not just in time?

Never Free From A Nonhistorical Cloud

We have not only pushed, stretched, and folded the present far into the future, we have also reframed the logic and purpose of thinking time. History is often the tool we use to construct this frame. But is history the most useful tool? What does history grasp? It comes to terms with what is actualized by an event, and the preconditions for an event. But what of the immanent experimental qualities of an event? Events — emergent new spacetimes — cannot be understood as the simple recording of a series of sequences. They are necessarily a creative act of becoming that are governed by their own production of ruptures and emergences. The event of a work on time and in time (emergence) is also a work against a time (history) for a time to come. An event does not only produce a new future—it also produces a new past. The emergence of new temporalities means that history itself is qualitatively transformed and augmented.

This suggests that time is fundamentally qualitative before it is quantitative: becoming/event before history. The time of measurement, the time of history, is secondary to the time of the event. We are of time before we are in time.

This interests us greatly. (1) We are coproducing new space-time events, (2) these are types of events that open up both new futures and new histories, (3) these new assemblages require of us radically new practices, ethics, politics, and other forms of engagement, (4) this asks of us a new aesthetics of composition that exceed the spaces of art, (5) these forms of composition activate both deep times and rapid times, (6) these forms of events can only be activated via experimentation with qualitative forces, and (7) these can begin with our everyday practices.

Now, long after Heraclitus, we ask ourselves how to shift our practices towards the composing of aesthetic modes of events. For what are all of the transformative manners in which an event happens? With a great pleasure, we see that these far exceed both the logics of beauty and the sublime as much as they exceed the human.

We would like to lay out a proposition with you, our readers — no, actually, a set of propositions — inviting you to become co-producers with time, producing qualitative time. We invite you to co-develop new tools to interact more critically, creatively, and experimentally with these new time-space practices.

Please follow this link to an introduction to this research: Research Exercises Introduction

Spurse, Fall–Winter 2009

This research project is part of Art Journal Vol. 69 No. 1 Spring. (http://www.collegeart.org/artjournal/current.html).

We wish to thank the following curators and organizations for supporting our research into temporal questions: Stacy Switzer and Grand Arts, Hesse McGraw and the Bemis Center for the Arts, Seth Goldenberg and the Denver Arts Commission, Bruce Bradley and the Linda Hall Library, and Joe Hannan and Art Journal.