APRIA #02 March 2021 Time Matters Peter Sonderen / Laurie Hermans and Katía Truijen / Ienke Kastelein / Marijke Goeting / Jesse Ahlers / Paula Walta / Claudia Molitor / Liza Rinkema / Terike Haapoja / Alice Smits / Rick Dolphijn / Sharon Stewart / Frans Sturkenboom / Saskia Isabella Maria Korsten / Korsten & De Jong / Joep Christenhusz / Sophie Krier, Christel Vesters / Monique Peperkamp APRIA #02 Content 4 Editorial: Time Matters (An Introduction) Peter Sonderen 21 Something Temporary: In Search of Circular Time Laurie Hermans, Katía Truijen 22 Walking Time Ienke Kastelein 35 Through the Time Barrier: Art, Design, and Our Changing Sense of Time in the Digital Age Marijke Goeting 51 How Strange, Her Voice: On Mourning, Language, Texture and Time Jesse Ahlers 54 La Durée Paula Walta 57 Composition as Hyperobject Claudia Molitor 65 (non)human histories: rock reading and remembering as strategies of telling time Liza Rinkema 72 In and Out of Time Terike Haapoja APRIA #02 Content 75 Othering Time: Strategies of attunement to non-human temporalities Alice Smits 84 A Call to Recognise and to Imagine: Amitav Ghosh, and Others, on Writing the Earth Differently Rick Dolphijn 92 moonsong (I have dwelt upon the moon) Sharon Stewart 109 Time in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright Frans Sturkenboom 122 REREREreREREreRERERERERE Parasite Saskia Isabella Maria Korsten 136 Text[ure] Korsten & De Jong 143 Soundings of Ecological Time in Contemporary Music and Sound Art Joep Christenhusz 154 Overtime Sophie Krier, Christel Vesters 166 Ecological Time: Natures that Matter to Activism and Art Monique Peperkamp 184 Colophon APRIA #02 March 2021 Peter Sonderen Time Matters* (an introduction) There is no time, right?, left. Abstract This issue of APRIA, Time Matters, was Time issues; compiled and edited by the ArtEZ Theory in time and again. the Arts professorship. All of these reviewed We all live in corona­ artistic (research) and academic contribu­ tions were created and written specially in virus time now, or response to the four­part seminar Time Mat­ perhaps already in ters (2019­2020). The aim of the publication and the seminar is to inquire into the chang­ post­coronavirus time. ing concepts of time in the arts and other Don’t we? How come? epistemic fields collectively, and to explore and test alternative – past, present and fu­ What time is it? Is time ture­oriented – temporalities. up? Are we passing time to become past time? Are * We would like to thank all the authors we losing or already lost Hermans and peer reviewers for their time and and Truijen efforts on behalf of this special issue on in time? What is time Time Matters. The editorial team. any way, what does it do? Without always being aware of it, time is, at all times and all the time, both present and absent in our daily life; and it will remain so, also when try­ ing to understand it. We attempt to grab it often, but lose it at the same time. As soon as we try to capture its properties, time, at all times, escapes our full understanding. How does time act, and how does it affect us, and does it, really? And what to think about past time, present time and, of course, future time that has come under threat by the past, 4 DOI: 10.37198/APRIA.a1 APRIA #02 March 2021 Peter Sonderen current and future climate crises, changing our no­ tion of nature all the time? What remains of time when we want to conceive an image of future times? How long is our future? Just as long as time? Or do we all live in preemptive time, which, accord­ ing to philosopher and theorist Armen Avanessian and reader in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths Suhal Malik, makes our present before we even have entered it ourselves? Which has lead, for in­ stance, to the new phenomenon of the ‘preemptive personality’: We know a version of this from Amazon[.com]: its algorithmic procedures give us recommendations for books associated with one’s actual choices but the preemptive personality is one step ahead: you get a product that you actually want. The company’s algorithms know your desires; they know your needs even before you become aware of them yourself. And next to the pre-, the post- has also popped up many times in our time: While the ‘pre-’ indexes a kind of anticipatory deduction of the future that is acting in the present—so that future is already working within the now, again indicating how the present isn’t the primary category but is understood to be organized by the future—what the ‘post-’ marks is how what’s Ien­ happening now is in relationship to what has happened but is no longer. We are the future of something else. The ‘post- ke Kastelein 1 ’ is also a mark of the deprioritization of the present. The present we live in is, in short, no longer self­ev­ ident. It is future, it is past, is it not present? Next to this notion of a pliable present, time is also Marijke Goeting going increasingly faster. Velocity has become cru­ cial in and for modern life. As Hartmut Rosa has analysed in his Alienation and Acceleration, modern life (roughly the last two centuries) is a time of 5 DOI: 10.37198/APRIA.a1 APRIA #02 March 2021 Peter Sonderen extreme acceleration.2 Time has become so domi­ nant that space – which was for a long time dominant in our culture – shrank in significance and lost terrain. It does so in many ways for our ori­ entation in the late modern world, Rosa emphasises; deadlines and processes are for instance no longer localised. Real locations such as hotels, banks, uni­ versities and industrial complexes have become non­places, i.e. locations without a history, an iden­ tity or a connection, as Marc Augé has put forward in his influential book Non-Places.3 Space and place do not remain untouched by the speeding up of time.4 Although we all have the feeling that time is slipping out of our hands, in particular with the ar­ rival of the internet and other digital means, Paul Virilio, known as the philosophical ‘high priest of speed,’ argued that speeding up is not at all unique to the digital age. The history of modernity is to be seen as ‘a series of innovations in an ever­increasing time compression,’5 like nineteenth­century trans­ port, which shortened travelling time, and twentieth­century media, such as the telegraph, telephone, radio and computer and satellite commu­ nications, which turned succession and duration into simultaneity and instantaneity. All technologi­ cal innovations enhance the independence of the social relations of time from space and the body. The acceleration therefore in fact ‘transcend(s) hu­ mans’ biological capacity.’6 Technoscience is speeding up the world to such a degree that things, even reality, are starting to disappear. Real space is 6 DOI: 10.37198/APRIA.a1 APRIA #02 March 2021 Peter Sonderen finally replaced by real time, and intensity super­ sedes extensity. This rather negative evaluation of ICTs (although Virilio is not against technology as such but rather against the fundamentalist, i.e. affirmative, belief in Jesse Ahlers it) is softened by Judy Wajcman’s statement – who, as a sociologist of work, researches ‘social time’ – that the supposed negative influence of ICTs on our personal time, i.e. the blurring of the boundary be­ tween work and home and colonising all of our time, is not completely correct. She inquires instead how digital technologies shape people’s sense of time and stresses that ICTs are ‘fostering new patterns of social contacts, providing a new tool for intimacy,’7 which is based on her notion that ‘Work is done in time, work is a temporal act.’8 Considering she wrote this before the increased use, or rather, the invasion of digital communications due to Covid­19, we should wonder, however, if she is still right about this ‘new tool for intimacy,’ because the general complaint, to which we almost all can testify, re­ gards a lack of intimacy and the longing for touch and to be touched. Our current meetings and con­ versations on Zoom or Teams and the like has made the disappearance of space, in more than one sense, extremely palpable. Let’s return to our time again. What do we mean by the pronoun our in ‘our time’? This is the how the French philosopher Jean­Luc Nancy in his The Birth to Presence (1993) describes it: 7 DOI: 10.37198/APRIA.a1 APRIA #02 March 2021 Peter Sonderen ‘Our time’ means precisely, first of all, a certain suspension of time, of time conceived as always flowing. A pure flow of time could not be ‘ours.’ The appropriation that the ‘our’ indicates ... is something like an immobilization – or, better, it indicates that some aspect of time, without stopping time, or without stopping to be time, that some aspects of temporality, as temporality, becomes something like a certain space, a certain field, which could be for us the domain, in a very strange, uncanny fashion, of property. Paula Walta And with space, he continues, ‘the points of tempo­ rality itself, which are nothing but the always becoming and disappearing presents of time.’9 Between these presents, between the flow and itself ‘a happening happens.’ Nancy’s our time is thus time that has been taken in possession by us, that has been halted by us and picked up by us out of the continuous stream of time. In the latter time, all presents follow each other. Using the word property, Nancy does not seem to refer to the contemporary, however, but more to the modernistic attitude of trying to get hold of the present to become possessor of the future.