Re: [-empyre-] time again

Jill Walker <jill.walker@uib.no> · Tue Aug 13 15:21:03 2002

One thing I wanted to murmur about here is time: the proliferation 
of different times . There's the time of sending, the time of 
reading and the time of replying on a list. There's the time of 
designing, updating, revising and uploading pages and sites. Norie 
Neumark, speaking here in Hamilton a few days back, talked about 
slowing down interaction time, encouraging a savouring of the time 
of the work. There are times of content too, futures, nostalgias, 
erasures and rememorations, memories of times you never lived 
through.

and the recurrent surprise of the reality of having to live through 
28 hours of waiting for a series of planes to travel from australia 
to europe. the person i'm waiting for is in no-time, no-place of 
videoed seatbacks and airports while i, strangely, sleep, wake up, 
work and eat dinner at the ordinary times (for me), but oddly 
(unusually) without emails or phone calls from the traveller. an sms 
from the airport in singapore (a two hour slot of possibility of 
communication) merely heightens the strangeness.
and time exists in unexpected ways. yes i can ring you, sms you, 
email you instantly, round the globe, for hardly any money; update my 
website from nearly anywhere, but if it's nighttime where you are and 
afternoon where i am i can't (shan't?) wake you. jetlag without 
travelling.
and, apart from these semi-globalised (yet always bodily, physical) 
times.... we've always had the time of the making, the viewing/using, 
the responding to art and writing and communication... it's 
different... but not that different?
and melinda, you wrote:

maybe ive been around computers for too long  but  i 've come to belive in
finity, in limits, to an end of possibility, to everything being a
mathematical probaility.

i thought computer ideologues generally speak as though everything 
can be faster, smaller, better? or am i thinking of this back to 
front from you? can you explain it to me please?
jill
(yes, i'll be picking him up at the airport in a few hours time)