Scalar Oscillations
by Diann Bauer
In this article and short video, Diann Bauer, visual artist and Digital Earth mentor, share with us her research at Cern, on the work of Carlo Rovelli and the question of Xenotemporality.
There is a discrepancy between the human experience of time and how it functions on a scale beyond our experience, leaving us with the questions.
How much is temporality, as a neuro-chemical phenomenon, produced as a result of evolutionary expediency?
And…
To what extent do the temporal perceptions of a sentient biological system correlate with a reality outside of that experience?
We have access to time outside of human temporality through Fundamental Physics which allows us to comprehend time at scales we have no direct access to. It is this research that has enabled us to in turn develop advanced systems that themselves function on scales beyond the experiential capacities of the human (GPS, HFT for example). These systems proliferate and provide the global systemic architecture that structures much of how we now live.
Xenotemporality is a conceptual tool to better understand that time is both alien to us yet we are completely enmeshed in. It intimately effects our daily lives and shifts how we understand ourselves as a force on the planet. Conceptualizing this alien-time is important to help navigate a reality that is both of our own making yet functions outside of our direct experience. For example, we do not directly experience the bending of space-time caused by Earth’s mass but we have knowledge of it, and we are able to account for it, enabling the accurate functioning of GPS systems. We, as a species, have evolved to function at a local scale but this is no longer adequate to how we organize, inflect, and orient the systems and infrastructures we rely on globally. Time is an important factor in this, in part, because of the way we have bound ourselves to the deep past and deep future via the extraction and burning of fossil fuels needed to maintain these planetary systems.
We do not directly experience the bending of space-time caused by Earth’s mass but we have knowledge of it, and we are able to account for it, enabling the accurate functioning of GPS systems. We, as a species, have evolved to function at a local scale but this is no longer adequate to how we organize, inflect, and orient the systems and infrastructures we rely on globally.
I am involved in ongoing research that aims to develop the concept of Xenotemporality. In the work presented here, I focus on the thinking of physicist Carlo Rovelli. Subsequent works in the series will look at a range of perspectives being developed across various scientific fields.
Scalar Oscillations is the third video in this series. It was done in collaboration with Seth Ayyas (audio) and at the invitation of Arts at CERN and FACT Liverpool. I take on Rovelli’s position that:
…the growth of entropy is nothing other than the ubiquitous and familiar natural increase of disorder. He suggests that the fact that entropy never decreases is an appearance within particular subsystems of the universe, …causality, memory, traces, the history of the happening of the world itself can only be an effect of perspective: like the turning of the heavens; an effect of our peculiar point of view in the world.
Extrapolating from Rovelli, Scallar Oscillations makes a distinction between time as it functions in science and temporality; the quotidian experience of time’s apparent flow from past to future. The work proposes that the discrepancy is a result of our physiology rather than something inherent to time itself. It asks how much of our experience of temporality correlates with material conditions outside of such an experience. If we evolved only to survive reality rather than understand it, then to comprehend time we need to become something else, something beyond the bounds of the human as we currently define it. Would a collaboration with a nonembodied intelligence (mainly AI) provide a fitting partner to better understand time outside of our own physiologically influenced perspective? Reality is perhaps stranger than we have the capacity to imagine on our own.
About the author
Diann Bauer is an artist and writer based in London. She is part of the working group Laboria Cuboniks who wrote 'Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation and the collaborative A.S.T. (the Alliance of the Southern Triangle http://a-s-t.co/#Home)' — a group of artists, architects and curators that use the art field as a platform to broaden interdisciplinary collaboration with a focus on urbanism and climate change. The project aims to conceive possible futures that are both reactive and propositional with regard to the shifting set of legal, economic, cultural and environmental forces that currently confront the globe. The work takes a range of forms including video installations, publications and workshops.
