The New Time and Space

This book examines the ways in which the conceptualisation and experience of time and space have been redefined in the contemporary era. Mobile phones, networked communications and freely accessible digital information have contributed to a shift in the way we experience and conceptualise time and space. Globalisation and international network coverage have collapsed distance and delay in communication. Mobile networked communication fosters a form of virtual time and space, which is superimposed onto territorial space. Time is increasingly composed of interruptions and distractions, as smartphone users are overwhelmed by messages.

In the beginning, there was no time or space; in their absence, there was void or chaos. The cosmologies constructed by the human mind — whether expressed as mythology, religion or contemporary physics — have posited a state of formlessness, or of nothing, prior to the existence of time and space. Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity occasioned a re-conceptualisation of time and space in the early twentieth century, noted that ‘scientific thought is a development of prescientific thought. As the concept of space was already fundamental in the latter, we should begin with the concept of space in prescientific thought’.¹ This insight pertains as well to prescientific concepts of time and to mythological accounts of the origin of time and space.

My primary concern in this book is with the changes to the experience and conceptualisation of time and space apparent in the early twenty-first century. These changes correspond to the widespread use in developed societies of the internet, mobile phones and networked communications. Globalisation and the international flow of information are other related factors. Before considering the new time and space in detail, in this chapter I survey the wealth of theoretical approaches to the conceptualisation of time and space developed in the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. Many of these theoretical perspectives pertain to the impact of technologies of communication and transport; others have elaborated analyses of the changing experience of time and space within modernity and postmodernity. The theoretical approaches considered in this chapter — drawn from a range of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban theory, media studies and technology studies — will serve as the base for my investigation of the contemporary condition of time and space in the next chapter.

Mobile networked communication fosters a form of virtual time and space, which is superimposed onto territorial space: this is the new time and space of the early twenty-first century. Social media conducted through smartphones and other devices has created a new form of virtual space, in which individual users are frequently engaged. Individuals connected to the network via smartphone, tablet or laptop may be physically present but are in effect absent, engaged in a virtual conversation. As a result, the physical world is increasingly overlaid by the virtual network sphere: space is an overlapping of the virtual onto the geographical.

One thousand and one Qing dynasty chairs set up in Kassel, Germany, awaiting 1,001 visitors from China. A cargo ship poised mid-journey in the Atlantic. A derelict abandoned factory. A detention centre in the desert. Six unemployed men, standing in a line joined by a collective tattoo. Faces painted on a footpath with water, evaporating in the sun. An arm wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, holding uprooted hair. A lost score broadcast from Auschwitz on a railway platform in 2012. An exhibition in Vienna in 2014 by an Australian artist based on the Japanese ‘Capsule Tower’ built in 1972. A ruined house reclaimed and populated by artists and the unemployed. These are all images of displacement in recent works of art. Space is rendered here as territorial space on a global scale: the space in which people, information and commodities move.

Temporality may be understood as a box of speeds or gears; each human society possesses such a multi-geared orientation to present, future and past. Just as each civilisation has its own nomos or orientation to space, so it can be said to articulate its own chronos, or perspective on time. As detailed in Chapter 1, the primary orientation of ancient societies was to the past, in which, it was believed, lay the Golden Age or time of perfection. The present was considered a fallen, deficient age, and the future could only be regarded with hope if — according to the doctrine of the cycle of time — it cycled back to the glorious past. Contemporary Western society observes a chronos diametrically opposed to that of the ancient world. The principal orientation is to the present and the near-future, where consumption is achieved, information is communicated, the new mobile phone, computer or tablet supersedes the old and digital progress is made. The past is largely dismissed, often contemptuously, as irrelevant.

Two women occupying a plinth barely big enough for one person, for 11 days, is an act of public intimacy. Coexisting was a performance work by the Australian artists Clark Beaumont, one of the 13 Rooms curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist in Sydney in 2013.¹ For the 11 days of the exhibition, Clark Beaumont sat on the tiny plinth, enduring discomfort, squirming for position in the restricted space. A historical reference point for this prolonged act of sitting is the fifth-century Christian ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who perched on top of a pillar for many years. A significant difference in this case, however, is that the sitting is done by two people, not one (see Figure 6.1).

The distribution of digital information across the internet has taken many forms, and has effected some major cultural shifts. The downloading of MP3 music files through peer-to-peer sites has offered free access to music, decentralised the music distribution business, defied copyright regulation and transformed the music industry and — to a large extent — the social role of the musician. Yet music files are only one form of digital information coursing across the internet. Digital photographs are another; the status, impact and social significance of photographs have also altered with the advent of networking.

You are sitting in front of a screen. The screen may be part of a digital audio work station, or it may be the screen of a laptop. You press a key and watch as the cursor moves through the waveform. You hear the sound at the same time as you see it traversed by the cursor. You decide to retrieve a sample, which you’ve stored in the computer. It’s located way up ahead of the present waveform: in a few seconds you’ve scrolled forward, claimed the sample and positioned it next to the waveform. You magnify the image, to get a better ‘look’ at the sound. You decide to insert the sample into the waveform, trying various positions. If you change your mind, nothing is lost: this is, after all, non-destructive editing.

We may expect some aspects of the contemporary experience of time and space to be reflected in recent video art and performance artworks. These two relatively young art forms, both having emerged in the 1960s, have often featured the construction of time and space as a core characteristic of specific works. These artworks have at times reflected the complexity of hybrid space, in which the virtual overlaps with physical space. Time has been assayed in myriad ways: the subjective experience of time has been weighed against the chronological charting of time; brief intensities of time have been contrasted with long, demanding durations. Video artists, exploiting the possibilities of digital video and computer editing, have created video works that manipulate time and build contained and particular versions of space. Performance art in many ways has been concerned with time: the real time of live performance, mediated time, extended duration, the psychological experience of time. Both art forms have produced capsules of spacetime that reveal facets of the contemporary experience and conceptualisation of space and time.