[-empyre-] time and desire

Thu Oct 15 02:54:48 AEDT 2015

Being "in time" with people is an excellent way of to think about the
sociability of technology, the way it mediates our relations, but also the
way in which sociability is largely temporal. In* Alone Together*, Turkle
emphasizes the dichotomy of, on the one hand, wanting to socialize, and, on
the other hand, doing so through technology that is also isolating. I don't
recall her having a discussion of temporality, but I think that's key.

Time is an important issue in the immersive qualities of online
pornography, especially duration, or the delay of eventual visibility.
Waiting for images to load and the duration of browsing become habit which
inscribe repetition and delay as pleasures of a different order. We
frequently talk about "losing track of time" because we have been absorbed
or immersed into a particular activity. This certainly relates to Gordon's
discussion of video games. Sometimes we only realize just how immersed
we've become by a particular activity when we regain a sense of time. To
have lost track of time is to have lost track of the uniform units of time.
Perhaps duration occurs when we no longer fix time as something happening
between two points, when the end point is distant and undefined. Losing
track of time also probably has something to do with losing awareness of
one's spatial relations. Absorption means we lose track of our
surroundings, both bodily and social awareness fades.

Time and absorption also play out in short clips, currently the dominant
format for online pornography. Short clips partly owe to the material
limits of the computer; it's a way to deal with slow load times or to work
within the limited size of most Random Access Memory (RAM). Time slows down
in buffering, when the computer is unable to process the flow of digital
data that carries the video at the same rate of occurrence that the events
of the video should transpire to us in “real time.” “Real time” is a
narrative technique in which the events depicted within the video take
place entirely within the span of the depiction and at the same rate. When
the computer cannot buffer data as fast as the flow of data, the narrative
is often disrupted, creating a stagnated sequence of events, a
discontinuous narrative of stops and starts. Slow load times cause a
heightened sense of duration; narratives start and stop. Most of these
clips also provide a limited narrative framework, which is itself a
narrative device. Viewers can project through the limited narrative
framework to imagine their own narrative for the scene. The use of
minimalist props on set further serves this purpose (think of how stripped
down most porn sets look).

Short clips also also manifest nonlinear time through the editing of
time-based footage nonsequentially. Clips frequently chop-up the linear
sequence of events of a larger pornographic movie, and viewers rarely find
the clips in sequential order when browsing video streaming sites. Viewers
sense time in the browsing of these videos as not primarily successive
instants but as composed of non-linear periods and cycles -- especially
when clips overlap or repeat events that are part of a larger narrative
sequence. Viewers can also return to clips in a different order, remixing
the larger narrative. This understanding of narrative sounds a lot like
what Manovich describes in *Soft Cinema, *or database cinema, although the
fragmented narrative of browsing pornography is different from database
cinema in that it's not algorithmically curated. (It might be
algorithmically curated in other ways, but that's a topic for another
day.) Viewers also have the ability to pause (freeze frame), fast-forward,
slow down, "rewind", and jump within or between clips.  Jumping from one
clip to another, piecing together a narrative, we are not stretching out a
flattened instant or creating a inconsistent sequence of events, but,
instead, we're extending a moment of one’s projected narrative. I don't
view this as moving back and forth but as moving sideways. It's a lateral
rearrangement of events. Time is compacted into stacked and varying
rhythms. Viewers actively engage in playing with time: it's ludic. In this
way, browsing online pornography suspends any sort of ending. Perhaps this
lack of ending only serves to intensify the browsing process itself (an
intensity caused by suspense), which participates in the viewer's
absorptive experience.

I have a lot more to say about time. So I'll just leave it there for now.

Patrick Keilty
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
University of Toronto
http://www.patrickkeilty.com/

On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 7:58 PM, James Joseph Hodge <
james.hodge at northwestern.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hello to all!
>
>
> Along with Gordon Calleja I'll be guest moderator for this week's
> discussion of design and compulsion.
>
>
> I'm interested in a few different aspects of Patrick's chosen theme of
> design and compulsion, and I'd like to suggest we concentrate a bit on time
> and the experience of temporality a bit more. Especially in terms of how
> the temporality of an "exhorbitant desire" instantiated by porn viewing and
> gambling, but also very ordinary, everyday forms of mediated experience.
> Here's my question:
>
>
> why do we take out our phones so often? Popular discourse often refers to
> "smartphone addictions." So there's one starting point.
>
>
> On first blush, checking a phone doesn't seem in line
> with "exorbitant forms of desire" like porn viewing and gambling, and
> yet we discuss our smartphone use in the idioms of compulsion and
> addiction. What are we addicted to exactly? The easy answer (and not an
> incorrect one, I believe) is "connection." More fundamentally, I want
> to suggest that checking our phones has to do with a desire to temporalize,
> to be in time with a host of things: friends, family, events,
> institutions, geographic areas, countries, bots, stocks, etc. Much here
> might be said about the vicissitudes of the experience of time in digital
> media and network cultures. But I want to suggest that there remains much
> to be said about the desire, the need, the compulsion to feel in time in a
> way that networks afford and simultaneously render impossible. Like
> gambling or porn viewing, it's not about perfect co-synchronicity or
> achievement but rather gleaning something of the lower level libidinal
> pleasures not entirely siphoned off by network capitalism.
>
>
> I'm tempted to say more but I hope this will start something building off
> the previous threads on compulsion and design.
>
>
> All best, Jim Hodge
>
>
>
>
>
>
> James J. Hodge
> Assistant Professor
> Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
> Department of English
> Northwestern University
> University Hall 215
> 1897 Sheridan Road
> Evanston, IL 60208-2240
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20151014/8d4ebcec/attachment.html>