Time, Technology & PerceptionStoffel Debuysere 29.04.2009

“Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.”- Peter Lorre in ‘Beat the Devil’ (1953), directed by John Huston, written by Truman Capote

Antikythera Mechanism

"Time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once"- Unknown

“I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me: For now hath Time made me his numb'ring clock; My thoughts are minutes”- William Shakespeare

John Harrison, H4 chronometer (1760)

“The clock, not the steam engine is the key machine of the modern industrial age”- Lewis Mumford

"Remember that time is money"- Benjamin Franklin, ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’ (1748)

“To this Observatory, then : a stern room, with a deadly statistical clock in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid”- Charles Dickens, ‘Hard Times’ (1890)

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”- Charles Darwin

“Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”- Aldous Huxley

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”- Albert Einstein

“Speed was the first thing the early automobile manufacturers went after. Races advertised the makes of cars”- John Dos Passos, ‘USA’ (1938)

“Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.”- Frederick W. Taylor

"As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience.”- Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding media: the extension of man’ (1964)

“I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at the second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent antipodean fragments of my fine scarlet ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.”- Marcel Proust, ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’, vol 2 (1919)

“Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.”- F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto (1909)

Marcel Duchamp, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 ‘ (1912)

“Present-day life, more fragmented and faster moving than preceding periods, was bound to accept as its means of expression, an art of dynamic “divisionism”’- Fernand Léger (1913)

Giacomo Balla, ‘Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash’ (1912)

René Magritte, ‘La durée poignardée’ (Time Transfixed) (1939)

Salvador Dali, ‘La persistencia de la memoria’(The Persistence of Memory) (1931)

“... Life distorts the geometrical shape and mathematical exactness of mechanical time...”- Stephen Kern, ‘The culture of time and space, 1880-1918’ (1983)

Umbert Boccioni, ‘The City Rises’ (1910-1911)

Umberto Boccioni, ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ (1913)

“I want to render the fusion of a head with its environment.I want to render the prolongation of objects in space ...I want to transfix the human form in movement.I want to synthesise the unique forms of continuity in space.”- Umberto Boccioni

“We must try to find a form to express the new absolute – speed – which any true modern spirit can not ignore”- Umberto Boccioni

Anton Giulio Bragaglia , ‘Balla’ (1912)

Anton Giulio Bragaglia , ‘The Slap’ (1912)

Etienne-Jules Marey

Eadweard Muybridge

“Cinema only produces what the eye can see in any case. It adds nothing to the power of our sight, nor does it remove its illusions.”- Etienne-Jules Marey

"The realist sees only the front of a building, the outlines, a street, a tree. Marie Menken sees in them the motion of time and eye." – Jonas Mekas

“My films are the ‘real world’. It’s not fantasy. It’s not a found object. This is the stuff that I see as the phenomena around me. At least that’s what I call the ‘Real World’.” -Bruce Conner

Andy Warhol, ‘Empire’ (1964)

“I wanted to see time go by”- Andy Warhol

“To understand what is happening to us as we move into the age of super-industrialisation, we must analyze the processes of acceleration and confront the concept of transience.” - Alvin Toffler, ‘Future Shock’ (1970)

Frank Malina, ‘Paths in Space’Lumidyne system (1962)

“To bring Time as a reality in our consciousness, to make it active and perceivable, we need the real movement of substantial masses removable in Space.”- Naum Gabo (1937)

Nicolas Schoffer, ‘Chronos 8’ (1968)

“It is not enough to create a work. This work must insert itself in the programs which guide the unfolding of individual and collective existence. The specifically programmed time of the work must intervene, participate and disappear in order to return again, in accord with the fluctuations in the programmed rhythm of the human environment.”- Nicholas Schöffer

"Speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed on man" - Milan Kundera, ‘Slowness’ (1995)

“During the mechanical ages we have extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing space and time as far as our planet is concerned”- Marshall Mcluhan (1964)

Apollo 11 (1969)

“All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel... The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by the television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication.”- Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’ (1950)

“the horizon of technology is speed because its origin is time”.- Bernard Stiegler

“No human language can withstand the speed of light. No event can withstand being beamed across the whole planet. No meaning can withstand acceleration. No history can withstand the centrigugation of facts or their being short-circuited in real time.”- Jean Baudrillard, ‘the Illusion of the End’ (1995)

“We will no longer live in local time as we did in the past, when we were prisoners of history. We will live in "world-time," in global time. We are experiencing an epoch that spells the international, the global accident.” - Paul Virilio

Harold Eugene Edgerton (Rapatronic photography)

“I don't claim to define the situation, I try to reveal tendencies. And I think I've revealed a number of important ones: the question of speed; speed as the essence of war; technology as producer of speed war as logistics, not strategy; war as preparation of means and no longer as battles, declaration of hostilities”- Paul Virilio

“Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere The next step for technology is universal access.”- Bill Gates (1999)

“What kind of time do we experience online, when we get lost amid dead links, get blocked at restriced access sites, search queries that lead to who knows where? It’s not clock time, ans it’s not Swatch time, it’s a time of lags and latencies, of waiting and clicking through, of fast and slow? It’s the experience of differing speeds and asynchronicity”- Robert Hassan

“Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey that reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we live it. After all, Number One, we're only mortal.”- Captain Jean Luc Picard, ‘Star Trek Generations’ (1994)

“Time itself, lived time, no longer has time to take place”- Jean Baudrillard

“We don’t just want airtime, we want all the time all of the time.”- Refused, ‘Liberation Frequency’ from ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ (1998)

Andy & Larry Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)

Douglas Gordon, ‘24 Hours Psycho’ (1993)

“The viewer is catapulted back into the past by his recollection of the original, and at the same time he is drawn into the future by his expectations of an already familiar narrative… A slowly changing present forces itself in between.”- Douglas Gordon

David Claerbout, ‘The Bordeaux Piece’ (2004)

“I dislike the discourse on slowing down and deceleration, because what those discourses do, is they still take ‘speedyness’ as their reference and then they slow down from there on. So it becomes therapeutic or it becomes a way of making the whole system crashing down, falling apart and disintegrating... If I work with decelaration is probably more deceleration of the perception itself, of how you observe.” - David Claerbout

Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Theaters’