Chaired by Laura op de Beke
Lise Amy Hansen and Janne-Camilla Lyster: More than now – placing an experience of co-temporality in movement
More than now – placing an experience of co-temporality in movement By way of an artistic exploration, we wish to address experiential aspects of the moving body in a heightened technological context whereby physical movement is increasingly available and analysed (Thrift 2008). We study the idea of co-temporality – that we experience, perform and materialise time in a variety of ways - in order to understand an expanded corporeality.
Movement is continuously materialised in our expressive bodies, and as such may form an aesthetic of time. It is now possible to capture movement, and as co-temporalities are synthesised through the body, each capture serves as an example of a temporal, experiential and expressive substantiation.
We will show examples of such material substantiation with a digital tool for dynamic visualisations of movement data. These examples give access to our sophisticated and continuous handling of ourselves and of our bodies, that so often fade into the background by its inescapable nature. These visualisations have a recursive effect, whereby the captured movement visuals inform and influence future movement and our experience of time.
Whilst dynamic visuals are generative, movement is in itself imaginative, conceptual, and metaphorical (Farnell 2011). In this way we may see that, as environments and technological contexts tune our movement (Coyne 2002), our movement are also tuned by their very performance. As they are experienced and performed, they create an instantiation or materialisation that can be seen as poetic as it draws on a rich imaginative, conceptual, and metaphorical experience. We mention the poetic aspect to highlight the agency that comes with the experience of the movement itself.
Our contextualised and experienced movement meet in every single ‘now’ and by paying attention to how these various temporalities exist and are performed we may shift how they come to matter. By focusing on a single capture of movement, we may see temporalities expressed in a variety of ways. Simply phrased, temporalties are visible in movement that is captured and visualised, which then may be transposed back to a new performed movement and sense of temporality. This flow of time in movement and materialisation is then altered and augmented into an expanded corporeality.
Bios: Lise Amy Hansen is a professor of design research at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. She has her background from the UK with Central Saint Martins and Royal College of Art and she held a studio in London for several years whilst also teaching at Central Saint Martins. Her research focuses on the engagement of performance and technology, with a particular interest in the rich complexity and diversity of body movement practices, new materialism and ethics. Her work engages with collaborative practice across disciplines and sectors, and a researcher and educator, specialises in participatory and critically engaged design practices such as in the NFR funded ‘InnArbeid’ with UiA, and the recently Arts Council of Wales funded ‘Making Movement Irresistible’ with UAL and Cardiff University.
Janne-Camilla Lyster an associate professor in choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the arts. She is a choreographer, performer, researcher, and writer. In 2019 she completed her artistic doctoral project "Choreographic poetry: Creating literary scores for dance". She has a special interest in prefigurative practices, notation systems and transdisciplinary artistic work. She has published novels, plays, essays, and numerous poetry collections. Her choreographic work has been presented nationally and internationally
Rupert Griffiths: Sensing the luminous night: Innovations in capturing and communicating observations of light pollution in an area of natural beauty
Anthropogenic time standards and artificial lighting have enabled humans to challenge the synchronising force of the Earth’s rotation and orbit around our star. These interventions help to facilitate the complex choreography of people and processes seen in contemporary societies. They also suggest an understanding of nature and society as parallel, touching lightly rather than deeply interwoven. Members of urban societies can experience a place in time with little awareness of the wider environments, ecologies, and planetary phenomena within which cities are held. This is a potential barrier to changing attitudes and behaviours to mitigate climate change and environmental degradation.
Through case studies in a nature reserve in Cumbria, UK; a garden in East London, UK; and a botanical garden in Bonn, Germany, this paper will discuss the application of design, creative practice, and technology to situate daily life within local and planetary temporal imaginaries that are attentive to natural and artificial light. It will discuss the design and installation of a network of unattended light sensors and timepieces that uses observations of environmental light to imaginatively situate the day-to-day life of these sites within various temporal scales. Through this, the paper describes a hybrid approach to timekeeping that brings together human time standards and environmental observation to align the temporal imaginaries of human societies with ecological and planetary processes, while highlighting the presence of potentially damaging anthropogenic processes, such as artificial light at night.
Such hybrid forms of timekeeping and environmental observation may help foster meaningful relationships between people and the environment, facilitate day-to-day awareness of the presence and extent of disruptive anthropogenic processes in our environments, and provide an imaginative framework for thinking about time and life in an Anthropocene context.
Bio: Rupert Griffiths is a social and human geographer, artist and designer with a background in architecture, urbanism, and microelectronic engineering. My research considers the cultural imaginaries of urban nature, asking how urban and humanaltered landscapes can be made meaningfully legible as morethanhuman ecologies. This contributes to a recalibration of urban imaginaries—and associated design practices—away from humancentred and towards the more thanhuman. My research draws from practices of close environmental observation, such as photography, phenology, soundscape ecology and nature writing, to propose new imaginaries that capture and communicate the diversity and multiplicity of biological, nonbiological and technological rhythms through which our environments unfold.
Astrid Schrader: Rhythms on the Beach: Microbial Mats as Sentient Symphonies
In their last chapter of “What is Life?”, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (1995) suggest that life is a “sentient symphony”. The tilted earth orbiting around the sun provides a metronome for daily and seasonal lives. Circadian rhythms enable cells to coordinate their physiology with cyclical changes in the environment such as Earth’s light/dark cycle.
This paper draws attention to temporalities and rhythms in the constitution and knowability of microbial communities in intertidal zones. I argue that microbial mats, the oldest life forms on earth, for which there are fossil records, literalize the metaphor of a “sentient symphony”. Coastal microbial mats are sun-light driven consortia of microbes often found in intertidal zones, where they provide a protection against erosion. Diverse functional groups of microbes intra-act to form dynamic multispecies ecosystems that some researches liken to a macroscopic living entity, others speak of ‘microbial synthrophies’. Syntrophy literally means, “eating together”; syntrophic relationships are symbioses based on metabolic processes. The close coupling of these diverse microbial groups is achieved through the cycling and recycling of elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulphur. As primary producers in microbial mats cyanobacteria have been observed to impose their daily rhythms onto the rest of the microbial community through the rhythmic release of metabolic products. Hörnlein et al (2018) liken the complex ecosystem of microbial mats to a choir. How may ways of seeing attuned to the interlocking of bio- and geo-rhythms of microbes challenge anthropocentric frames of time?
Bio: Astrid Schrader is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter. She works at the intersections of feminist science studies, human-animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanist theories. Her work explores questions of responsibility, care, and agency in scientific knowledge production, new ontologies, the relationship between anthropocentrism and conceptions of time, and questions of environmental justice. Astrid has been particularly interested in scientific research on marine microbes. In her current project “Caring with Haunted Microbes,” she develops new theoretical approaches in science and technology studies (STS), combining “agential realism” and “biodeconstruction.” Working with artists and marine scientists, she also seeks to establish new approaches to and methodologies in cross-disciplinarity.
Scott Thrift: One Year at a Time: Reframing the Meaning of the Moment
This presentation draws attention to the problem of our time—our time—and society's self-imposed perception of its scarcity. The presenter suggests that strict adherence to a single linear dimension of time measurement is a fundamental flaw of our current worldview. Linear time's ubiquity has eradicated the relationship between modern humans and the natural world's cycles, feeding a seemingly intractable nonchalance in the face of climate collapse. Equating the quality of a moment with the indexable linear tick of a second renders the present into a hairline fracture between the past and the future. The outcome of this hyperfixation on industrialized time is manifold. From the crippling anxiety and burnout of manufactured urgency to accelerating quarterly profits no matter the cost. At the same time, modern culture implores individuals to "live in the moment," freezing humanity's potential in a desperate grasp for meaning in a world moving too fast to appreciate. In search of answers to the problem of our time, the presenter arrived at a question, "How can we live in the moment when the moment changes every second?" The answer to that question is the subject of this presentation: a physical device created to form a meaningful relationship with the moment called The Present.
Bio: Scott Thrift is a media artist, entrepreneur, and autodidactic designer currently reshaping time perception with his life's work, The Present. Utilizing his formal education in film studies, Thrift co-founded the Emmy award-winning production company ' m ss ng p eces ' granting Thrift a decade of extensive world travel to six continents—documenting multidisciplinary design processes, the birth of the TED organization, and the effects of globalization on the nature of human experience. This unique lens on the pulse of an ever-changing world inspired Thrift to develop his seminal work, The Present, a transformational artifact designed to guide our thinking and behavior into greater harmony with nature. A bestseller at the prestigious MoMA Design Store, his timepieces are shifting perceptions in thousands of homes in forty-two countries.