In Time
There is something terrifying about existing in time. This liquid ghostlike entity gushing through us; that walks with us; changes things left untouched. Through a lifetime of ordering, it is what stays always unruly. With unwavering consistency; erratic as hell; always lacking somehow and at the same time intensely present; simultaneously forgotten and recalled. It builds and deteriorates, all in the same movement, the landscape surrounding us and our very selves, mentally and physically. It is in our biology at the same level as it is a purely made up concept. As an artist I have always considered my main material to be time. And always somehow within a distinction between time and temporality.
Time and Temporality
Time is something given, non-malleable, whereas temporality, the experience of time or the way time is ‘constructed’ or structured in representation, operates in multiple different ways simultaneously – in our dwelling between memory, our writing of the present as that memory, our normative expectations and our changing sensations of time passing. Where time seems to form this elemental raw material that exists unprocessed as a certain constant, temporality forms a more workable material shaped from the very existence within and in relation to time. It is timeliness – an embodied materiality that forms out of the experience of time qualities. In temporality, time always already forms a base solvent, but it is the solute of various qualities and intensities of temporality that makes for reactions to occur. Temporality somehow opens up to an experiential and politically engaging concept of time materiality, in contrast to the grandeur of time as phenomenological and philosophical godlike superstructure. Temporality can be worked with on an equally conceptual, thematic, contextual, and material plane.
Temporal Artistic Practice
Even with an art practice heavily engaged with the visuality of the HD video format, often working in filmic productions mostly in tune with that of cinema, I still consider the field I work in as that of a temporal artistic practice. No matter how much the works may be comprised by a variety of other materials, digital or analogue; video files, screens, lights or plastic, photo paper, silicone – it is still temporality that constitutes the base materiality. It is a practice that revolves around fine-tuned methods and headless experimentation into the underlying structures of time. How its (meta)physicality can be distorted, swayed, set free, anticipated; or how it may be experienced temporally, in relation not only to how it intermingles with already existing temporal understandings of the viewer, i.e. an understanding of historical narratives, collective as well as personal memory, chrononormative linear time relations, but really also as temporal experiences that are immediately transformed in co-creation between work and viewer. Temporality is thus not only a medium to work with conceptually, contextually and experimentally, but also a strange reflective matter that, the second it’s put out there, unhesitatingly feeds information directly back into the practice it came from. Complex and unforeseen time-landscapes unfold in this mirroring; in all their temporal unruly consistencies.
An argument could of course be made, that all practices are inherently temporal, since they must unfold temporally one way or another; or that all material would have the same reflective character, since it would always essentially be of that same reality that it is presented in, but there is something truly entangled in the way temporality as material, entwines with a temporal world. The temporality of a time-based artwork - a film, for instance - is at the same time completely novel (it chops up ‘time’ in a way that ‘real time’ can’t be chopped up; a rearranged temporality that we have learned to read and to accept as ‘normal’) and not novel at all - since this chopping up of time is really what we do every time we tell someone a story, selectively focusing its temporality ('then she said… then I said') In a strange way the substance worked with within a temporal artistic practice, is of the same substance as the world it engages with, and thus the way it meets the world instantly transmutates it, deforms it. Exposed to the many other temporalities, it is reflected back as new temporal modes that one could not have dictated or foreseen from the outset. Temporality as material always already seamlessly entangles with the temporality of its context. In a way it enters an own reality where the material temporally works on – without the artist forming it. It evolves, grows or collapses, spreads virally, seeps and trickles. This meeting between, or really synchronicity of, material and context – how one is strangely indistinct from the other – exists as a form of tempor(e)ality.
Tempor(e)ality as Socio-Political
Tempor(e)ality speaks to the timeliness of reality, or how reality unfolds in accordance to time. How the space of reality is determined by the time that jolts this space into being. Time runs through reality and reality is formed around an understanding and experience of time, its temporality. Were we to change our engagement or concept of time, the very fabric of our reality would immediately change correspondingly. This idea of reality experienced temporally of course has a certain phenomenological dimension to it, and this line of thinking does create a certain backdrop to this entire endeavour, but in the way I wish to employ the term here, it is considered much more of a socio-political specification. One that frames tempor(e)ality as a construct that has to do with collective memory, authoritarian history, chrononormativity, constant real-time presence, lived time versus data time, and the making fluid of personal and labour time. The very phenomenological experience of temporality, is one that is of importance here mainly in how spaces, for such experiences to occur, is formed structurally, authoritatively or autonomously. The way it feels to exist in tempor(e)ality is very important to this whole project, but it is not for this reflection to move into the massive depths of phenomenological enquiries into the realm of time and temporality. Tempor(e)ality for this purpose is something that forms in and around a political subject in a dimension of political reality.
Temporal Mobile Devices
It can seem as if temporal situations speed up in reality, thematically and contextually, just like the very nature of the temporal seems to evolve and create new understandings of the passing of time. The artistic processes of my practice are always directly and constantly informed by these rapid changes in a surrounding tempor(e)ality. That my practice exists in a sort of fluid exchange with that evolving tempor(e)ality, and is likewise guided by it (even if it may make a case of seeking to reclaim certain agency or ownership over the temporal going-ons), is something that I have been very alert to; as a situation to challenge and utilise at times, at others, as mere obstructive noise that the artistic work must somehow navigate in. The radical changes in how our tempor(e)ality relates to the screen medium, forms one of these temporal evolutions. Media have always dictated how reality unfolds temporally, from cave paintings to the written word, through the distributed image, across the advent of cinema, and well into the Web 2.0. But this new evolution is related to how we associate with and re-articulate our tempor(e)ality through temporal mobile devices. This notion of a certain relationship between device and experience, in the speeding up of how reality is perceived, is something that has been important to my entire engagement with the moving image. So when this development spurs a moment of pause in me right now, I am, like in so many other moments of pause, not fully aware of what exactly incentivised this pausing and when exactly it commenced. It has to do with acceleration, definitely. Irreversibility, for sure. Mobility, a crucial factor. Dread? Undoubtedly. Nihilism? Yeah, but perhaps as shadow twin to dread. It also has to do with horror.
Political Temporal Artistic Practice
I do not only consider temporality as an aesthetic or technical medium, but really also a political one. A certain experimental work with temporality unfolds in my work; thematically as a realm where points and flows of time can be revisited, distorted, reworked, imagined; contextually as rearrangements in different settings of authoritarian and collectively decided temporalities; and materially in how the very structure of the temporal is worked upon, formed and arranged – how it can be moulded and stretched really; or how it can spill, harden, crack, fade out. This time-based practice is inherently a political one, all its gestures, methods and inquiries armed with a certain insistence of it existing in a political ecology. Directly and confrontational as social commentary, or dormant as processes and productions always already imbedded in the political realm of tempor(e)ality. All in all, what I have been searching for throughout my artistic practice, is ways to create potential spaces for mirroring, expansion or distortion of our tempor(e)ality, to occur.
This search for a ‘political experience’ of temporality, makes the distinction between phenomenological accounts of temporality, in their privileging of the experiential, and accounts forming around a political subject in a dimension of political reality a bit more complicated. Since experience is structured by temporality, we can only ever know ‘time’ through ‘temporality’. Which means that we do not exist in ‘time’, time is something we make out of stories we tell ourselves about its reality.
