Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In the Network Ages, the accelerated movement of people, images and ideas is producing rapid changes in the experience of time. Conditions of proliferation, compression and erasure contribute to a destabilization of reality discussed in critical conversations from contemporaneity to the Anthropocene. In response, artists’ experiments with media, archives and perception play a crucial role in exposing the mesh of political and economic interests that orient time today. The social, physical and life sciences study the individual, cultural or physical realms of time at specific scales. Artists, by contrast, often seek to connect the global and intimate, engaging: phenomenological time, as we feel it unfolding in consciousness; historical constructs of time; and the temporal forms of matter. Artists’ investigations include work with: anachronism (Coco Fusco); futurism (Hito Steyerl), the transhistorical (Mark Leckey); ruins (Pierre Huyghe); geography (James Geurts); and archives (Brook Andrew). These 21st Century practices build on historical and durational approaches to space and the body in Land Art, installation, performance, site-specific and new media practices from the 1960s onwards. Art’s scaling of seemingly disparate dimensions of mental, social and physical worlds points to the concept of a habitat of time. This re-imagines scientists’ 18th Century notion of habitat as the space in which flora and fauna evolve. In a temporal ecology species, technologies, societies, materials, systems, and cosmology appear as durational, interacting and diverging forms. This responds to Giorgio Agamben’s invocation: “no new culture is possible without a new conception of time.” (Infancy and History, 1993).