Meditações - atemporalidade do presente

[...] The Internet, however, doesn’t need standardized time to function. It can use it in forecasting delivery times of packages, say, or in time-stamping messages, and so on, but it also does much of what it does in a state of atemporality. The day is not a pie but a vapor, a tenuous notion. Standardized time’s regulatory powers are fading. We seem to have entered the Age of Relativity, wherein we finally experience time as Einstein imagined it, contracting and expanding relative to the velocities of observers. Quantum mechanics — I am paraphrasing here — has long posited that the universe is made of space, not time. Culture, with its usual sensitivity, is responding to the new atemporality by melting down and recasting clocks for audiences now accustomed to inhabiting several different kinds of time simultaneously. (Communication can be as fast as the sending of an emoji, and an art piece can take twenty-four hours to “see,” or even longer: Kara Walker’s recent installation, “A Subtlety,” an enormous Sphinx made of sugar, was intended, as she said to ArtNews, to be “very temporary,” to dissolve, eroded by time. One could see time acting upon it as the weeks passed, which was part of its appeal.) If it’s an anxious moment concerning time, it’s also a playful and expansive one. All temporal bets are off, including, given climate change, the seasons. It’s still one earth, but it is now subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present, and future occupy one unmediated plane.

Stacey d'Erasmo