Blow out: an aesthetic of time travel Janet Hand
For Debra Swann, Paraphernalia, Apt gallery, 2006.
Prologue
A proposal:
Celestial bodies
stir us with time's infinite horizon. Because of this we are able to reinvent
our world in fictions more or less beguiling, more or less fertile …
Art and
Speculation:
Time travel is
one flight of speculative fantasy that has no evidential legacy on earth aside
from those that lie within the conventions of make-believe, mythology,
mysticism and theology, and there is no rationalist theory by way of
explanation for simultaneous travel across times. The prospect of travelling
multiple time-waves accordingly offers imaginary beginnings and challenges to
writers, artists, mystics, theologists and scientists alike: What is
time-travel? How is it experienced? And what is its efficacy for humans?
Knowledge:
The advent of
critical-theoretical knowledge as a means to give explanation for our lives
gives the kind of freedom that can extend our familiarity with things beyond
acquaintance. It can also make for a kind of theory-lust akin in part to
wanderlust. The more one travels the more astute the teller, so the mythology
goes. The wandering mind like the wandering traveller can quickly develop the
sickness of a compulsion to leave no stone unturned, to leave no place
untravelled. This sickness, a kind
of blind inattention to things in the here and now, comes with the haste to
cover all territories during one life, imagining all can be explained or else
patterned by an applied belief in accordance to the best narrative explanations
available at any given historical time. The current predominance of
critical-theoretical philosophy in the evaluation of art and in the formation
of artistic concerns and contexts is only good for the time-traveller in its
potential for an opening to the horizon. The traveller that is compelled to
cover everything must close their sights down, must limit their horizons.
The following
story takes as its starting point a tangential linguistic return to knowledge as a sequential form of telling as with storytelling. This aesthetic and
mythic story form that begins with the prospect of telling what time-travel
offers as a sensate experience beyond the ritual patterns of every day
business, is cast out here from one point in time to the time of perpetuity.
What the consequences of an aesthetic and mythic story of time-travel for
conceptual currency are I can neither affirm nor deny as my subject has no
apparent object for the scrutiny of science or logic. As I can offer little of any exact explanation as a
consequence, I can only ask you in turn to entertain in all seriousness the
reasons an artist or writer may wish to give for involving themselves with the
subject.
Part one
Blow out: an
aesthetic
Common insight
has it that travel makes you weary and wise, makes you open your eyes and
reinforces experiences of foreignness. Not so common is speculation on that
last sensate frontier associated with travel yet to cross: time-travel. As an
ideal prospect time-travel holds the key to an imaginary infinity allowing for
unceasing e-motion towards a totally liberated and liberating life: 100%
openness to 100% joy.
Anticipation of
tracking known routes and destinations over space is qualified by the human
anxiety of packing for unknown eventualities. Whether geographic movement is
the product of leisure-time, economic migration, escape or transient
homesteading, circumstantial conditions apply. Travel through time, however, as
a flight of human potentiality, is a minefield for anyone preparing for it,
what to pack? The wiley time-traveller must aspire to heavenly bodies.
Preparation for
perpetual time-travel also entails a high margin for error. Nobody knows
exactly how weather is experienced when accelerating fast through time-zones,
nor if the body can tolerate the intensification of encounter at the required
time-speed necessary to exceed planetary determinates of duration and of matter
or of cultural and historical co-ordinates related to the measures of time and
geography human beings rely on. The converse effects of time-travel are
anticipated to be proportionate with condensing time from the expanse of time,
which amounts to an experience of forgetting time, or of no-time precisely as
the simultaneous experience of multiple time-zones can no longer be measured by
mortal clockwork or against mortal bodies travelling in a line between birth
and death. There is such a minuscule likelihood of tampering with the
historical order of things through time-travel that the only human action with
proximity to its effects is idiotic laughter. Beyond fear and mastery it is
true that laughter is very human, but laughter vacates the body like so much
hot air as a human sign that is as close as a human sign gets to the
recognition that explanatory understanding is one small narrative means to sum
up existential potentiality.
The spin-off of
the proximity to pure time-travel that is imagined here is the massive
probability of getting lost in a time-space vortex from which there looks like
no turning back to the regulated meter of things from 00- 2400 hours.
Consequently pure-time-travellers, according to this scenario, run the risk of
losing everything: the ability to do things, look back or forward, the ability
to stand still, or to do nothing at all. Nothing stops, nothing stays put,
nothing grounds the velocity of hurtling towards complete blow-out and no
current human breaking system could withstand the force of a time-traveller
ejecting themselves from their plane of celerity either. To run at such a
time-speed, the traveller must evacuate their being.
Part two
Encounters with
time travel: myth
Modernist Man:
This man tries to
tame time through mechanical means. H G Wells created a time-machine that found
the future wanting.1 His machine granted the ability to travel progressively
forwards or backwards within historical time, wherein the potential for Nell
Gwynne and the last Czar of Russia smoking peace pipes at dawn on a bridge in
Timbuktu could be envisioned by the eager reader. Wells' future worlds were so
filled with mutated forms of political battle, honours warring to the end of
man with ever more efficient weapons of mass destruction that his heroic C19th
traveller despaired. This man also found a future filled with no-places
populated by human-like bodies suspended in the kind of stupor saved from a
life of apathy and boredom only by having no measure of pleasure and motivation
to judge themselves by.
Classical Man:
This man expands
time to the cosmos through a temporal-spatial unity wherein unchanging
celestial harmony is the ideal prospect to aspire to through adventures of
enduring combat.
Homer conjured a
ship and sail to ponder the eventful voyages of his epic heroes dreaming
visions across 'wine-dark' seas of love and home. His faith in unchanging
beauty in ideal form was ruled over by Gods embodying a hope for fertile and
peaceful times.2 Homer's geographic travellers, destroyed through symbolic
means, the fatalistic illusion of everyday rituals as the destiny of humanity,
although years of journeying many lands to return to the sanctity of home
brought the expanse of time back to a nostalgia for a time of lost familiarity
as it matched up to the heavenly bodies they strived to emulate.
The here and now
of the C21st time-traveller:
Far from these
kingdoms of Heaven and Hell, aside to these delimited imaginary horizons with
characters striving negatively for everything, for nothing at all or for more
of the same, is the prospect of a sensuousness only imaginable internally or
else fabricated by a microscopic focus in the here and now that is open to the
long connections between now and then and between now and never that can be
stretched beyond measure. Time gives form to travel through matter.
Libraries,
studies, studios and laboratories are loci for the kinds of ramblings or exact
activities that inventors do. And as likely as not thought casts through the
various dimensions and aspects of making something else happen.
The travels of a
promiscuous mind turn doodles into things that hold together, that work, become
work and can be made sense of circumstantially. Jr. Zack Tron, a child protégée
aged eight and touched by more than a little stardust, had when I last
encountered him in July 2006, already worked out the means to travel continents
by way of an extraordinary capacity to bend the invisible frontiers of national
languages in paying close attention to their overlapping sounds and meanings
and by listening and following patiently. He had done this without moving from
his digital T.V. set in the beautiful metallic caravan where he lived with his
parents, who were too, inventors of fabulous lives on the move. Zack has spent
the last year with his older brother - A.A. (Aerial Angel,) - aged eleven and
touched by the same stardust as Zack, dismantling the mystery of time-travel by
building from things to hand a machine that, through sheer dint of its
rotational speed creates a vortex of energy that one day will take the whole
family into the zone of multiple times with a hyper fan-assisted aerial for
cultural navigation and a battery-operated watch that, in the accelerated
condensation of time-space precipitated by the fan, becomes simply an
instrument for clocking the sheer number of simultaneous events possible to
experience. The older boy, already a witty near teenager, prefers A.A. to his
full name as it resonates with the knightly uniformed rescuers of the road for
those travelling by more mundane means. He already knows that although his younger
sibling is destined to be the inventive journey-maker, he is content to be the
time-guardian and protector for the whole family enterprise.
Travellers ruled
by distance and space may choose to find a way to get somewhere seemingly
impossible by a technical training plus a loving attention to attire and to a
toolkit, so long as they also remember to carry an indicator of their expected
achievements tucked like Scott's national flag in a back-pocket or rucksack.
The neo-romance
of other worlds that time-travel offers, on the other hand, draws splendour
from familiar settings and materials that saturate our visual landscape with
things that will take off all at once upon a time. Escaping manual settings
they catapult into the starry skies and oceanic depths of experience and let us
say that the heart beats faster when we witness such events in an explosion of
all senses. We see more than what we see empirically and cannot think or
explain why we stand still and soar at the same time. This kind of infinity is
also caught by the big toe as a conceptual never-never land as it has an
experiential starting point, stumbling block or else is realised materially.
The dynamic
between what is already there and what is possible moves from the surface of
the earth and is precipitated by an allure to travel or else disappears as
another phantom: ephemeral and transient. When we point at something we see or
experience that we haven't seen or experienced before, we are usually either
excited or afraid. New things produced in time-travel have vast potential to
pull us in either direction. We are seduced or we are repelled, we run with or
run away from, we risk everything or seek safety. The more we explain, the more
we cling to our habitual safety-rafts. The more we run with unexplained
phenomena, thoughts and things the more we extend our horizons through the
elasticity of language, of vision, of lives and things, the more we breathe
life into matter.
Time practiced,
and the leap of faith that any travel takes, flies with or without the pack,
symbiotically sensing the pull of movement when encountering currents. The
sensation of such movement, of devastating attention, are experiences relating
to the rush of time-travel creating new reaches. The vast scope of information
created by wormholes across living rooms, across streets and roads, across and
between points simultaneously, is evidence of an ability to travel on the spot.
Faith in
time-travel is an aesthetic equivalent to unconditional love: timeless and
immortal because it is ungrounded and soars above all utility value. Just like
all theological idioms, faith relates an awareness of experience that is more
difficult to accept than a mind of limits and of reactive warring. It is
entirely bound to the fruitfulness of bringing something new into the world.
This procreative
appetite will only be reduced to the mad-laughter of the pure-time aesthete if
the projectiles that the traveller casts oblige none of the conventions of this
world hammered to our masts and that give us the tools to extend ourselves.
Such tools enable the time-traveller, like the space-traveller, to make maps if
there is a need to go back along the same path to a home, to relocate some form
of allegiance with fellow travellers or to be sure that any proactive expansion
of the world is somehow conveyed to others.
New things
conjured by modes of travel unencumbered by retracing in exacting ways what has
already been can also manifest through enigmatic means. This involves
impressionistic half-memories or visions that predate or foretell beyond the
traveller's lifetime transformed through them in the present: Angel song and
the spirits in us of the dead, the dying and unborn are pre-echoes or simple
ripples of the songs of other lives in a warp that expands and rebounds in
transforming and surprising ways across infinity. These extended experiences
forego the possibility of a homeward journey to a bounded community, to what
was before and to the safety rafts of unchanging or inflexible cultural repetitions
even where traditions are passed on they too bend with time's curved arrows…
The repetitions
of mechanical industry cannot replace the phenomenal life-and-death flow of
things, nor the excited rush that happens when utterly caught up with the swing
of bringing all-time to the present in a transient and changed image or thing
we may have thought logged and archived as an already there thing and
understood as such.
The scientist and
art:
In the journal of
theoretical mathematician Brendan Saw, a reader will find an account of a
journey of invention that only finds an audience in the future tense.3 Saw
spent many years working out the algebraic probability of time-travel and made
a curious connection between time-travel and the relative dynamics of
time-space-matter through speed that pre-empts Einstein by some four years and
provides a counter sense to Paul Virilio's most recent and pessimistic
concentration on the aesthetics of speed which is all-too-human in its
negativities.4
Most exceptionally
Saw was able for the first time in the history of his field to contribute an
equation for a specific conundrum relating to bird flight: the conundrum being
that the speed of flight and distance travelled by flocks moving against
earth's gravitational pull did not add up according to any measuring device
available at the time of this observation. His diagrammatic calculations and
the geometric images he sketches, put pay to the imperatives of formal symmetry
shared by many of his contemporaries. Produced in this journal are some
extraordinary photographic images representing travel that exceed the technical
capability of the camera and of the eyes of the photographer, to present time
in discrete progressive sequence. Not only was photographic practice at that
moment disabused of any relation to nature's pencil, but the images also efface
a familiar currency today relating to the authority of the photographer to
fabricate at will. Bodies disappear and reappear within the frame
consecutively.
This loss of time
is not explained by Saw's systematic account of shutter-speed or by the
environmental conditions logged in the journal. The images do, however, put a
halt to a scientific explanation that haunts us to this day, that is both
mechanical and speaks only in the terms of a closed community of scientists
concerned with the credibility of quantifiable data: That time-travel is only
possible through memory reflex. In other words, time-travel is all in the mind.
Such disembodied speech is the preserve of explanation and not of birds or of
time-travellers.
The diagrams
produced in Saw's journal are another means for getting closer to what was
experienced otherwise from the vantage point of sea before he too disappeared
for two months. On this travelled time Saw was also lost for words. The
diagrams Saw stated 'are closer than my algebraic formulation to what I
encountered on my travels to study the astonishing phenomena for myself'.
Epilogue:
Never-never land,
like no-man's land is a land of no-time (an abundant unconscious, or that
parallel time-zone inhabited by the live-dead spirits of the earth 'who'
inspire the living with Angelic grace). No-man's land is no-place (literally
utopia, or that glistening sovereignty that offers the chance of a freedom to
invent without ground beneath our feet and with the mighty wings of the sphinx
extending the human scope to soar beyond solidity's bow). The uneven movement
between the daily rituals of the living and the infinity of never-never land,
of no-man's-land continues to breath life into what is yet to be thought, yet
to be made and yet to grace us with all gravity.
Footnotes:
1. Wells, H.G. The
time machine: an invention.
Oxford: Heinemann, 1989 [1895].
2. Homer, Odyssey. Trans. from Classical Greek by Walter
Shewring. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
3. Saw, B. The Elementary Geometry of Time
Travel. Cambridge:
Hartwell Press, 1911. The artist Debra Swann is grateful to the author for
drawing to the reader's attention here her near namesake Brendan Saw's love of
anagrams.
4. Virilio, P. Negative
Horizon. Trans. by M.
Degener. London: New York: Continuum, 2005.