Planktons in the Sea: A Few Questions Regarding the Qualities of Time - Journal #27 September 2011 - e-flux

As Kei Kreutler points out, conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes. This dissonance between felt time and measured time gets more confusing by the day, and it’s beginning to feel unsustainable. Amidst the unsettling chaos, it’s tempting to crawl back to the tim... See more

- “On the elegant analog clock, meanwhile, time swells and recedes, like waves and seasons and life. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos.”

The body is now presumed to have more in common with the segmented clock face — which at least approximated natural rhythms, even if it locked them into a standard compatible with the needs of capital — than it does with the “vapor” of internet time.

Our cultural temporality becomes almost like a sixth sense. The aim of my approach is to step away from the current system of clocks. In this context, philosopher Byung-Chul has has suggested relearning the art of lingering, and sociologist Helga Nowotny argues for a rediscovery of the vicissitudes of live. Taking these two approaches into account,... See more

without the spatial filtering of culture, time is the only source of amplitude. Counterintuitively, this ensures that the past keeps recirculating, always presenting itself as new.

In a world where time is a quality, events are recorded by the color of the sky, the tone of the boatman’s call on the Aare, the feeling of happiness or fear when a person comes into a room. The birth of a baby, the patent of an invention, the meeting of two people are not fixed points in time, held down by hours and minutes. Instead, events glide

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In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blin... See more