Geometries of Time

Introduction

To anticipate the uncertainties we are facing, whether environmental, biological, or social, we question and contextualise the tensions between the increasingly blurring absolute representations of reality and the relative spacetime of entangled processes. By means of architectural diagrammatisation, the work cuts across deep time, traceable in geographical strata; the linear time of progress; the cyclical time of seasons, tides, and bodily rhythms; and lastly, nonlinear, relative, and relational concepts of spacetime.

The work is a critical exploration into the connections and discrepancies between these geometries of time and their implications for the ways in which we engage with the landscape. It aims to critically examine the concept of tabula rasa, the succession of superimpositions and erasures that constantly reshapes the formation, morphology, and very meaning of landscape. Time cannot be disentangled from space, and space-time not from matter-energy. We want to call into question the notion of void or vacuum without matter or energy. As Karen Barad puts it, “the vacuum is filled with the indeterminate murmurings of all possible sounds: it is a speaking silence.” 1

Entangled landscapes

In resonance with Barad’s words, our installation seeks to explore the complex entanglement we are confronted with today, moving beyond the absolute void, that is, space as an empty container predominant in modern geometry from enlightenment onward. It experiments with the delineation of an under-construction map recovering the murmurings with which every place is potentially filled.

The point of departure is the extreme landscape of the Mojave Desert, central in the current debate around the plan to build a nuclear waste repository inside the Yucca Mountain. This extreme landscape stands in the collective imaginary as one of the archetypical loci of the wilderness, a concept that, progressively deviating from its original meaning, has been historically instrumentalised to justify clearing to provide emptiness for cultivation, renewal and so forth. Indeed, under the formula “going West” huge territories have been occupied and eroded by the capillary diffusion of capitalism in all its historical forms. Colonialism involved the erasure of lives, ecologies, rituals, and traces that filled these landscapes. Is this not the case with the first nuclear testing sites? Were they vacant, uninhabited, and uninhabitable places? And, how does this relate to other processes, such as the contemporary burning of the Amazon, or the erasure of primeval ecologies justified by zero-net deforestation?

Diagrammatisation

The process of diagrammatisation is a material-discursive practice that reconfigures our relation with the world, exploring latent potentials within an associated milieu and suggesting a broader set of relations connecting multiple environments - spaces and times. A diagram is deterritorialised, not bound to a particular territory, scale, and time-frame, but allows for drawing trans-spatial and trans-temporal relations. Moreover, it is an operational device capable of opening up new areas of sensation and intensity. Diagrammatisation entails a focus on technicity: technical processes and objects produced by supposedly enlightened and advanced humanity, enabling us to underline the frictions and discontinuities they generated. In addition, it allows for drawing connections between abstractions of space, time, matter, and energy. (fig. 1)

According to the Stoics, time is cyclical: the universe is eternal and evolves following the relentless repetitions of its cycles. In an anthropomorphic fashion, they defined three mythological figures, identifying respectively: Aeon, the eternal time that embraces past, present, and future; Kronos, the linear time defined by the continuous succession of events; and Kairos, the time of crisis and opportunity responsible for the episodic universal conflagrations that open up cyclical ways to rebuild the world.

David Harvey distinguishes absolute, relative, and relational ways of understanding space and time. 2 First, there is a certain absolute notion of space and time found in classical Euclidean geometry, the modern Cartesian coordinate system, and Newton’s space as a container isolated from time. Second, a relative conception of space-time can be attributed to Einstein’s relativity theory, non-Euclidean geometries, and a certain shifting sense of space-time, which Harvey calls “time-space compression” and can be associated with technological development or technicity. Last, he identifies a relational approach to space-time, which derives from Leibniz’ monad, wherein space and time cannot exist outside the processes of their unfolding. This relational approach requires further exploration and resonates with the concept of entanglement in quantum physics.

In accordance with Harvey’s line of thought, which in part derived from Henri Lefebvre, geometry and geography are understood as being not neutral or objective but constructed socially and culturally. To take this further, science at large is a matter of accountability and “response-ability” rather than objectivity, as Barad, with Donna Harraway, suggests. With regard to the presented artefact, this could lead us to Félix Guattari’s notion of the production of subjectivity and his ethico-aesthetic approach, emphasising the irreversibility and responsibility inherent in the creative act. 3 The audiovisual installation puts into operation the diagram, performing an exploration across, on the one hand, different abstractions of time and space, and on the other, the entanglements between various landscapes in formation, generating an archipelago of landscapes and multitude of times linked by the resounding echoes of exploitation, a warped cross-section exploring one of the possible configurations of the entanglement.

Installation

In the beginning there is noise, white noise. According to Gauss, white noise contains all frequency components equally distributed throughout the entire spectrum and implies that every two instances in time have different values - there is no repetition. Immersed in this vast sea of all possible tones, the audience is facing Aeon, eternal time, endless space. From this infinite field of possibilities, the audiovisual installation renders an aerial view of the Mojave Desert and two panoramic views of the Grand Canyon, immediately calling into question the temporal scale of this landscape exposed by its geological strata: the endlessness of its formation in deep time. (fig. 2) This landscape is the empty surface and playing field of colonial and capitalist practice. Two sites of exploitation emerge from the desert: Yucca Mountain and Nevada National Testing Site, where nuclear testing not only contaminated the native’s land, but erased their entire existence. They trigger the unfolding of a multiplicity of landscapes exposed to similar processes of colonisation and erasure.

Critically arguing against the presumed emptiness of these places, rituals and everyday rhythms start to be extracted from the noise in the attempt to retrieve an erased conception of cyclical time from a pre-colonial past. Cycles, calendars, myths, and natives’ practices begin to emerge, amplifying what is actually only a weak trace of these civilizations. The environments are manipulated again: the linear time of progress and capitalist expansion cuts across the cyclical rhythms, radically disrupting and rearranging them. The isolated fragments or sites start to be connected by these processes of colonisation, moving from noise and stochastic probability distributions (space-time-matter-densities) to interactions between linear and cyclical rhythms and back. (fig. 3) Intensities affect one another through sensing machines, cross-modulations, and feedback. Processes trigger events, internal reconfigurations, and transitions - sonically and visually. The installation becomes a continuous reciprocal rhythm and relational diagram in itself.