Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

INTERFACES: STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

EDITORS Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College

This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed new media. The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a transdisciplinary fascination with all things visual, from high to low, and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture — broadly conceived — that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications.

For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com

Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries

Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood

Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences

Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism

Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past

Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus

Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade

J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds, updated and expanded edition

Erina Duganne, The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography

Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator: American Concept-Cities from Kodak to Google

Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, eds., The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture

Jeffrey Middents, Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru

Michael Golec, The Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art

Dartmouth College Press    Hanover, New Hampshire

CONNECTING

TECHNOLOGY,

AESTHETICS,

AND A

PROCESS

PHILOSOPHY

OF TIME

Dartmouth College Press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2012 Trustees of Dartmouth College

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barker, Timothy Scott.

Time and the digital : connecting technology, aesthetics, and a process philosophy of time / Timothy Scott Barker.

p. cm. — (Interfaces: studies in visual culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61168-299-1 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-61168-300-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-61168-301-1 (ebook)

1. Human-computer interaction.

2. Digital media—Philosophy. 3. Space and time.

4. Aesthetics. 5. Technology and the arts. I. Title.

QA76.9.H85B357 2012

For Michelle and Chloe

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Whitehead and Deleuze

Trains, Telephones, Televisions

Mediation

Time, Process, and Multi-temporality

one    EXPERIMENTING WITH TIME

Convergences

Performing Digital Aesthetics

Technology as Temporalizing

two    TIME AND PROCESS

Process

Whitehead’s Time

What Is an Event?

Perceiving Events

three  DELEUZE’S TIME AND SERRES’S MULTI-TEMPORALITY

What Deleuze Reads in Bergson

The Virtual

Serres’s Time and Digital Presentness

A Time That Moves Sideways

four   THE TIME OF DAVID CLAERBOUT, BILL VIOLA, AND DAN GRAHAM

The Time of David Claerbout

The Time of Bill Viola

The Time of Dan Graham

five    EVENTS AND INTERACTIVE AESTHETICS

The Event and Present

The Story Is Like a River …

Time and T_Visionarium

Re-presenting Events

Rethinking the User: Humans and Technology

six     TECHNOLOGY, AESTHETICS, AND DELEUZE’S VIRTUAL

Time and the Virtual

Delays and Movement

Extensions, Entanglements, and Prehension

seven A UNISON OF BECOMING

The Effect of Relations

A Digital Extensive Continuum

The Digital Past

Time, Process, and Databases

eight  DATABASES AND TIME

Multi-temporality and Frames

Organizing Temporality

Events and the Archive

The Database in Time

The Database and Temporal Relationships

Reterritorializing Data

Databases and the Extension of Occasions

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Dennis Del Favero, Magnesium Light, 2009

Ken Rinaldo, Autopoesis, 2000

Candice Breitz, Mothers and Fathers, 2005

Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Neil Brown, Matt McGinity, and Peter Weibel, T_Visionarium, 2003–8

David Claerbout, Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007

David Claerbout, Shadow Piece, 2005

Bill Viola, The Greeting, 1995

Masaki Fujihata, Field Work@Alsace, 2002

David Rokeby, The Giver of Names, 1990

Matthias Gommel, Delayed, 2002

Luc Courchesne, Portrait No. 1, 1990

Wolfgang Münch and Kiyoshi Furukawa, Bubbles, 2000

Mark Amerika, FILMTEXT 2.0, 2002

Dennis Del Favero, Pentimento, 2002

Grahame Weinbren, Frames, 1999

Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Seeker, 2006

Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, The Dumpster, 2006

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, A Short Film About War, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was completed while I was employed as a research fellow at the iCinema Research Center, the University of New South Wales. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dennis Del Favero, the center’s director, an artist with unique and unrelenting vision, and an extremely generous and supportive individual. I would also like to thank Anna Munster for all her support and advice during the completion of this manuscript. Her work is a continual inspiration, and this book would not have been possible without her. Ursula Frohne has also been extremely supportive of my work, and I owe her a great deal. Also Steven Shaviro has read and made comments on several versions of the manuscript as it moved toward its current state. I thank him sincerely for his insightful, collegial, and encouraging comments. A shorter version of Chapter 1 originally appeared in the journal Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 1(1) with the title Re-Composing the Digital Present. Several ideas and the critical discussion of David Claerbout’s work also originally appeared in the journal Time and Society with the title The Past in the Present: Understanding the Temporal Aesthetics of David Claerbout. I thank the editors that I worked with, Brianne Cohen of Contemporaneity and Robert Hassan of Time and Society, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the journals for their work in helping me test out and develop these ideas. As always, my warmest thanks goes to my wife Michelle, who has, through everything, provided me with unconditional and unwavering support.

INTRODUCTION

Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier — here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

TIME, ALTHOUGH EXPERIENCED by everyone and everything, is a notoriously difficult concept to come to grips with. After all, it is always moving, changing, and escaping our grasp. In the fourth century Saint Augustine, in his theological ruminations on God’s relationship to time, wrote, For what is time? Who can briefly and easily explain it? … So long as no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to the one that asks, I suddenly find that I do not really know.¹ In other words, time is a concept that we use every day and that we very commonly make off-handed remarks about, but when we think about its existence seriously, beyond what the clock or the calendar tell us, we run into all sorts of difficulties.

Augustine’s question What is time? continues to be asked in many different places and has received many different answers. It is sometimes described as a container for the events of the universe, sometimes as a system of relations among instantaneous events, and sometimes as a form of continual becoming or dynamic change produced by process. As well as this, time has been described as nonexistent, and explained as a purely mental concept that humans, along with other higher-order animals, use to order their experience of reality into a sequence of events. Time and the Digital does not necessarily ask the well-worn question What is time? It somewhat sidesteps this problem with the help of the process-oriented thought of Alfred Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. This book instead reformulates the question, asking, How is time produced? and explores the new experiences and concept of time generated by our interaction with digital technology.

Over the last few decades discussions in the philosophy and history of technology from a diverse range of thinkers such as Don Ihde, Stephen Kern, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and Manuel Castells have shown in many different domains that our experiences of time and space are linked to our experience of technology.² It is relatively agreed — and I do not think too much of a generalization — that in the contemporary world, the development of vast networks, increasing data transfer rates and the ubiquity of computing have changed the way that the majority of us experience the world. As David Harvey has pointed out, developments in the speed of technological processes, such as the horse and cart, the jet engine, the telephone, telegraph, and new communications technology have resulted in a time-space compression, experientially shrinking the globe.³ However, the drive to conceptualize the way digital technologies may produce new temporalities, in addition to the new experiences of distance and global geography, has somewhat waned in contemporary digital theory.

Time seems to have been given short shrift in descriptions of digital interactivity in place of space. This can be seen quite clearly in the wide array of spatial metaphors that have become part of the popular vernacular used to describe digital interactivity; these include the virtual space of the Internet, information highways, Web sites, data clouds, and the now ubiquitous metaphor-based global user interfaces (GUIs) that present the desktop as an office environment containing files, folders, and trash. The dominance of space in digital theory can be traced to the discussions surrounding 1990s cyberculture, where the idea of interacting across separate virtual and real worlds seems to have taken hold.⁴ We see this particularly in terms of sociological theories of Internet use, where it was postulated that the Internet existed as a virtual third place, a meeting and socializing space for distributed users, where they can transcend the space of their daily lives.⁵ Likewise, in digital art there has been a preoccupation with questions of space, with artists and writers focussing on the way layers of digital technology can overlay material space, augmenting or mixing this space with digital imagery or information.⁶

Attempting to move beyond these limits, Time and the Digital rethinks the relationship between time and digital technology, taking an approach grounded in aesthetic theory. In this book I want to indicate how a new theory of time, developed out of the work of a set of process-oriented philosophers, can be seen to change the way we understand the relationship between the use of digital technology and time. To this end I investigate a set of experimental digital artworks. These examples experiment with digital technology, pushing it beyond its usual application, and through this they allow us to see something unique about the manner in which technology may produce time.

Emphasizing the temporality produced by the process of interacting with technology may make many important contributions to the way we understand our technological relationship with the world. Understanding how technological processes may produce temporality not only highlights the way recent developments in media technology have impacted upon our understanding of the relationship between the past, present, and future. It also leads to a reformulation of ideas of memory, affect, and agency in interactive settings, as we begin to position temporality as produced by a process involving multiple human and nonhuman actors dispersed across space and time. It also leads to a reexamination of the relationship between historical events, as new archiving and networking processes enable new links to be made between historical data.

Time and the Digital, like many of the texts that deal with the intersection of technology and culture, situates itself in the in-between fields, attempting to flesh out the consequences of an encounter between aesthetics and digital technology. Of course, this is not the first text to do so; it leans on many major accomplishments in the field, including the work of thinkers such as Adrian Mackenzie, Matthew Fuller, and Brian Massumi. Building on this work, Time and the Digital makes a unique contribution to this body of work by approaching the theorization of the encounter with technology from the perspective of process philosophy, temporality, and aesthetics. In particular it explores the way digital technologies used in aesthetic pursuits may alter our sensory understanding of the world, specifically the way that these technologies may alter our understanding and experience of time. I do not, however, merely want to apply the philosophy of time, as a history of ideas, to the study of pieces of media and works of art. Rather Time and the Digital seeks to engage new media theory in an encounter with philosophy, to work concepts of time and process through aesthetics, to describe new experiences of temporality, and to generate new understandings of time. To this end, Time and the Digital engages with a number of major works throughout the history of media art, as well as recent interactive works, and puts forward a new way to understand our aesthetic and processual engagements with these artworks. From this exploration comes a new way to understand our encounters with digital technology in general, both in terms of art and everyday life.

In order to argue for a temporality produced by the process of interacting with technology, I base my understanding of time on a reading of A. N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, modulated by Gilles Deleuze. Working originally as a mathematician and logician at Cambridge, then in the field of philosophy of science at the University of London, Whitehead developed his metaphysical system of process philosophy at Harvard from 1924 onward. In the 1920s, a period in which the development of quantum physics radically transformed the scientific definition of matter, Whitehead proposed a system for viewing reality as a product of a continuous process.

Whitehead’s process philosophy reunites philosophy with the new scientific view of the world to propose that very small processes — which in the language of science could be considered as quantum phenomena — combine to produce what we customarily consider as observable substances. For Whitehead, a major task of philosophy is to explain the connection between the objective, scientific view of reality and the experience of reality from a more everyday or subjective viewpoint, although this subjectivity is not limited to a human subject. He states in Process and Reality, All metaphysical theories which admit a disjunction between the component elements of individual experience on the one hand, and on the other the component elements of the external world, must inevitably run into difficulties.⁷ Here he points out that philosophical thought cannot separate perceptual fact, emotional fact, causal fact, and purposive fact without bifurcating nature in a way that is fatal to the development of a satisfactory cosmology.⁸

For Whitehead, scientific observations of, for instance, molecules in the atmosphere and the red glow of the sunset, as well as our intellectual and emotional response to this red glow, are all equally real. He states, For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. It is for natural philosophy to analyze how these various elements of nature are connected.⁹ Whitehead’s thought has wide ranging implications, including a reassessment of the concept of abstract and concrete entities, a radically new understanding of substances, an ontology that regards the primary and secondary qualities of objects on the same level of existence, and, importantly for the present argument, a world in which process produces time.

Deleuze’s philosophy proposes a similar ontology, connecting his metaphysics with mathematics and science, where the processes, potentials, and virtual elements of entities, rather than their identity as an observable or material substance constitute their existence. It is precisely the temporal character of reality that dominates the philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, with process — and the time produced by process — taking on a major role in both thinkers’ work. In Whitehead, as with Deleuze, there are not things made but rather, as Henri Bergson puts it, things in the making.¹⁰ It is the process of entities, not their substantiality, which constitutes their existence. This type of process thinking is particularly apt for digital aesthetics. The digital image can be thought of as a relatively unstable object, as it is only produced through an ongoing technological process. The digital image, whether static or in motion, is the result of continuous and ongoing computations.¹¹ It does not exist as a thing made, but as a thing that is continually in the making. The digital image is linked to a stream of code; it would never attain existence, never come into being as an image upon the screen, without a constant flow of information.

It needs to be mentioned before proceeding that this book is not designed as a guide to Whitehead and Deleuze, nor is it a critical interpretation of these thinkers’ work as a whole. Instead, Time and the Digital examines how a distinct set of Deleuze’s ideas on time, inspired by Bergson, modulate a reading of Whitehead’s time and allow me to approach questions of process and time in various experimental artworks. Time and the Digital is a work on a set of cutting-edge ideas, not a book that presents a full critical interpretation of Deleuze and Whitehead. It instead puts forward a way of understanding a selection of their ideas aesthetically, as they might be embodied, enacted, or experimented with in contemporary art.

WHITEHEAD AND DELEUZE

To begin to understand Whitehead’s time and indeed Deleuze’s time, we first need to come to grips with their shared position on the existence of time in an ontological sense, as more than a product of human minds. As Deleuze states, time is not interior to us. Instead it is we who are interior to time.¹² We are interior to time in the sense that time, for Deleuze, is anterior to subjective experience, with its existence in reality being distinct from its measurement and ordering. Deleuze acknowledges, of course, that the traditional measurement, ordering, and unifying of time may indeed be undertaken internally by the subjective mind.¹³ However, this type of subjective time only relates to its measurement and ordering, not to its nature in reality. For example, clocks and calendars are a technological engagement with time, intent on its measurement in pulses, not necessarily indicative of its nature.¹⁴ They are, at their most basic, a linear measurement of the passing of time. In the following discussion I also look at technological engagements with events, but I am not interested in measurement. I instead focus on the way digital processes and relationships may produce new experiences of temporality and concepts of time.

There are several ways to chart Whitehead’s connection to Deleuze, most obviously perhaps through both thinkers’ use of Bergson. The connection between Whitehead and Bergson is clear, as Whitehead acknowledges Bergson’s influence on his contemporaneous philosophy. There is also a clear connection between Deleuze and Bergson, elucidated in Deleuze’s book Bergsonism. This is again seen in Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, an element that forms a major part of his ontology and the invention of which is based largely upon his adaptation of Bergsonian concepts. Although Deleuze makes no regular reference to Whitehead, a valuable theoretical framework may emerge by allowing Whiteheadian and Deleuzian concepts to enter into a dialogue with one another and to cross-pollinate.¹⁵ As James Williams points out, there is not a Deleuze’s Whitehead in the same sense that there is a Deleuze’s Hume or Deleuze’s Nietzsche or Deleuze’s Bergson.¹⁶ However, there is a link between the two thinkers, firstly provided by their common adaptation of Bergson and subsequently by the way that both these thinkers frame their philosophy around the concept of the event.¹⁷ As such, in order to take a Deleuzian reading of Whitehead, and process thought in general, I use a particular aspect of Deleuze’s thought, one that is mostly found in his use of Bergson.

Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s positions on time and process resonate powerfully with each other, with both these thinkers posing time as a product of process, not a product of the human mind. Both Whitehead and Deleuze importantly position the mind as within reality, as a particular kind of image among other images, as emerging from interactions with the environment. As Bergson states, The brain is part of the material world, the material world is not part of the brain.¹⁸ I take as a premise that time exists in reality, and that it is this existence that prompts our consciousness of experience into being. After all, we have experiences before we have a thought about these experiences. It would be distinctly non-Whiteheadian and non-Deleuzian if we thought of time as created entirely by the human mind of a subject. For Whitehead as for Deleuze, it is the other way around. At each point the subject is created by time, as a passive synthesis of the experiences of the past. At each point the subject becomes, as past occasions are prehended in the present.

Beginning from the foundations provided by Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s process thought, Time and the Digital does not enter into discussions of consciousness per se; rather, following Whitehead and Deleuze, I focus here on the processes that precede the subject and set the condition for experience. By doing this I hope to uncover some of the ways that new types of temporal experience may emerge in our interaction with objects and processes such as the Internet, the archive of the database, and the particular programming language and software processes enacted by digital systems.

One of the only times that Whitehead is overtly mentioned in any significant way in Deleuze’s work is in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.¹⁹ In the chapter titled What is an Event? Deleuze cites Whitehead as the philosopher of the event, and constructs a commentary that illuminates the concept of the event that runs throughout his entire body of work.²⁰ The event, a concept that I will begin to investigate in Chapter 2, when thought through Whitehead and Deleuze, can be understood as a collection of processes, some of which are generated by a user and some generated by a technological system. When investigating digital interaction through Deleuze and Whitehead, and thus placing emphasis on process rather than preformed substances, interactive events cannot be reduced to ideas of a subject or user using a technological system. Instead, I would like to understand the event as a process of interaction in its fullest sense, as an interpenetration of a human with technology.

TRAINS, TELEPHONES, TELEVISIONS

The type of technological events that I am interested in exploring can be perhaps most clearly illustrated by looking to the past. Take, for example, the coming of the steam train in the nineteenth century. As Schivelbusch has pointed out, the coming of the train in the technological explosion of the industrial revolution not only altered habitually understood notions of time and space, but the great iron horse was also thought to cause imaginary ailments such as railway spine, and adverse effects on the eyes and ears due to the squeal of the brakes and the fast-moving countryside flashing through the windows.²¹ These were of course imagined effects, brought about by the recognition — and indeed fear — of technology’s dramatic emergence and intersection with modern life. But this is not necessarily contra to my argument that technology has actual effects on our perception and understanding of the world. What was not an imagined effect of the coming of the train was the way that, for the passenger, the landscape was framed by the windows as a series of scenes in motion, with the train becoming, as Sara Danius, citing Schivelbusch, points out, a framing device on wheels, anticipating cinematic perception.²² Here the passenger sees the landscape reordered by the technology that moves them through the world, with the machine and its motion being integrated into visual perception in a similar way to the projector apparatus.²³ In terms of a Whiteheadian aesthetic, we could say that the train, and in particular its motion and the framing of its window, emerges as an entity through which information is perceived, intervening between the eyes and the landscape. The train here, as a technological device, not only makes the unseen seen but adds another sensory object to or experience of the world, changing the way we think about our visual reality and also about movement and time.

Another example of technology interpenetrating and reformulating human experience can be provided by communications technology, in a similar sense to Harvey’s argument for space-time compression mentioned earlier. In order to demonstrate the agency of technology in experiences of time and space, one need only look to developments in communication, beginning with the mid-fifteenth-century development of the printing press. Since Marshall McLuhan,²⁴ it has been widely acknowledged that the shift from script to print, and from print to more recent developments such as the telephone, television, and Web 2.0, fundamentally altered the structure of human relationships across geographies. Advances in communications technology have allowed people to remain dispersed, as ideas, in the form of manuscripts, electric currents, or pulses of light, travel vast distances and in diverse