Time and the Digital
Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time
9781611683004
9781611683011
Distributed for Dartmouth College Press
Time and the Digital
Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time
Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker’s Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity. Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations • Acknowledgments • Introduction • Whitehead and Deleuze • Trains, Telephones, Televisions • Mediation • Time, Process, and Multi-temporality • Experimenting with Time • Convergences • Performing Digital Aesthetics • Technology as Temporalizing • Time and Process • Process • Whitehead’s Time • What Is an Event? • Perceiving Events • 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 • 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 • 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 • Technology, Aesthetics, and Deleuze’s Virtual • Time and the Virtual • Delays and Movement • Extensions, Entanglements, and Prehension • A Unison of Becoming • The Effect of Relations • A Digital Extensive Continuum • The Digital Past • Time, Process, and Databases • 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