The Atemporal Event

jar — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 11:45:29 +0000

The Atemporal Event

The COVID pandemic has prompted many people to reconsider their previous living and working rhythms and to consider alternatives. We believe that the global enslavement to the standardised time of clocks and calendars has had a negative impact on us individually, socially, and environmentally. We aim, therefore, to change perceptions of time by helping people step outside societal time, treating time instead as a malleable material that can be stretched and moulded. This exposition describes our process, outcomes, and analysis in staging an event using an alternative approach based on natural and material time processes specifically related to the body and the external day/night cycle driven by light colour and intensity. In a twenty-four-hour event in London designed around chronobiological phases, we investigated our research question of how to change perceptions of time by treating it as a malleable material. We discovered that treating time as a malleable material necessitates first stepping outside of the clock-time system: in our case, using daylight and bodily chronobiological phases as alternative time-givers. Dialogues using linguistic and non-linguistic means between ourselves, our collaborators and participants, as well as with our tools and materials, resulted in treating time as place, and places and things in temporal terms. We discovered that time is not only stretchable but can take different shapes and qualities, with multiple times existing alongside each other, by 'programming' actions and activities through performance, rhythm, and materiality. Our research focuses on the broader issue of the ‘time crisis’ as identified by sociologists, chronobiologists, and philosophers, as a result of acceleration processes driven by digital technologies and contemporary 24/7 societal norms. We address this by bringing together Helga's research on ‘uchronia’ (temporal utopia or non-time) and Kevin's anthropological perspective on designing embodied experiences.

jar Thu, 12/30/2021 - 12:45

Time

uchronia

Performance

design

light

experience

conversation

Issue

OPEN EXPOSITION

Helga Schmid and Kevin Walker

Everything That Shines Sees: Flash Light, Photography and the Acheiropoietic

jar — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 21:19:35 +0000

Everything That Shines Sees: Flash Light, Photography and the Acheiropoietic

This exposition takes a close look at the concepts of self-origination and mediation for a better understanding of the photographic image engendered by a flash of light and its natural radiation. Starting from my own artistic experiments with fulguric and cosmic rays, performed in cooperation with a lightning simulation lab in Oxfordshire (UK) and with the nuclear research centre CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), it puts forward a speculative approach that looks beyond static and traditional assumptions about what it entails to 'be photographic'. Through the exploration of the creative role fulfilled by a sudden burst of light across different time periods and different manifestations (fulgurites, imprints, photograms, sound), focus is laid on the part the acheiropoieton can play in this revitalized apprehension of the photograph as a technical image and of the agencies involved in its mediation. The research projects discussed thus aim to foreground the involvement of nonhuman contributors in the formation of contemporary images and their epistemology as a possible way to re-think perception in a time increasingly shaped by a reliance on (artificially induced) visibility.

jar Tue, 10/27/2020 - 22:19

Issue

OPEN EXPOSITION

Dominique Somers