Atemporality for the Creative Artist

It's not a perfect explanation, it's a contingent explanation for contingent times.

You can physically outlive the period in which explaining things in this way makes sense.

A new generation will arise who does not need things explained to them in this way. They will not wonder at a slogan like 'futurity now', because they will have never known anything different.

We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. "Gothic High-Tech." The ruins of the unsustainable. And the other symbol is the favela slum, "Favela Chic," the informalized, illegalized, heavily ne... See more

Becoming 'multi-temporal', rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don't bind us to anything i... See more

What's needed here is like a kind of atemporality that's like agnosticism. Just a calm, pragmatic, serene skepticism about the historical narratives.

We are living in an atemporal network culture, and I don't think that requires a moral panic. I think it ought to be regarded as something like moving into a new town.

The question is: now what? Given that we have atemporal organized representations of verbal structures, what can we actually do? Where is the fun part?

What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of 'Gothic High-Tech' and 'Favela Chic' (as ... See more