The Vertical and Horizontal Orders of Time
The news reports that Japanese scientists have excavated ice cores in Antarctica to analyze the components constituting air one million years ago, in order to make an estimation of its temperature and amount of carbon dioxide at that time. An ice core is ice drilled from the Earth’s poles or glaciers. Snow which has accumulated and frozen into ice becomes a database of the Earth’s aerosphere. The solo exhibition hibernatemode by artist Su Yu Shin at Fenko Catalysis Chamber, and its moving image work (2019) of the same name, source multiple images from the weather station in Antarctica. How do we measure time in the land of the midnight sun and the polar night? Another unit of measurement can be used. In the Antarctic, there is a species of moss that grows less than one millimeter a year. When its image appears in the video, the text narrates, “Vertical order of time.”
Exhibited in Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Antonio Serna’s series of videos The Same Sun (2017-2018) presents the audience with a map of the Earth from the geological past, several million years ago. At that time, the paleocontinents were not yet broken up by movements in the earth’s crust. The video’s narration tells of alternative histories that have arisen at different locations and times based on the geography of this map. In The Same Sun / Calendar: 345 Ma – Upper Suriname River, James River, Guinea-Bissau, for example, in the world of 345 millions years ago, the slaves in colonial Suriname have the opportunity to escape and return to their homeland Guinea-Bissau.
Time is not directional, neither inherently horizontal nor vertical. It can be comprehended as a constructed concept. In these two works, time is visualized through the varied layers of ice cores, the growth of moss, and algorithmically speculated geological maps. Why do we measure time? Time allows human beings to create our identities, by rationalizing consciousness and forming memories. An abstract concept of the mind, time was once thought of as an absolute measurement for the necessary objectivism that scientific research requires. In the study of geology, for example, the concept of deep time is used to understand the formation of stratum and rock. Since the founding of the theory of relativity, however, time is revealed to be an indefinite unit. As suggested in hibernatemode and The Same Sun, the spatial vectors of verticality and horizontality are implicated in time, and influence our sense of time.
The Bodily Experience of the Audience
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio claimed that visual information, auditory signals and sensations are integrated inside our body, forming the basis of the neural system which generates subjectivity and image making. [1] The sensory experience in the neural system is where subjectivity originates, and along with the experience of time, this forms the autobiographical self. [2] This autobiographical self is constantly acting in the present, relating to its past memories, and projecting itself into the future. [3] But how does this sense of time develop and serve the autobiographical self? Scientific research has not reached a conclusion.
Yet in hibernatemode and The Same Sun, sense of time plays an essential role. Through the particular combinations of image and audio in the works, as well as the physical movement in the spaces of both works’ installation layouts, the sense of time is manipulated.
The video work hibernatemode is exhibited in two adjacent spaces. The first thing the audience encounters upon entering the space is a large screen hanging in the main gallery, playing a video. The six-channel soundscape composed by sound artist Aloïs Yang leads the audience into a smaller room with blue meditative lighting. In this space, a smaller screen on the wall plays the same video as the first screen, but asynchronously, creating a sense of déjà vu. The sound and the visuals iterate continuously in the two spaces. There are no instructions to view the videos in a certain order, nor any sign that the content of the videos are different. As the two videos share the same soundtrack, the viewer can sense the changing position of their body in space and time through their auditory perception. When the viewer walks back and forth between the two spaces, it is as if they are entering the time of Aiôn, as referenced by the artist in the work’s description. In this type of time, there is not any before and after, nor markers of time. Only endlessness and the in-between exist.
When visiting the exhibit of The Same Sun at Taipei Contemporary Art Center, the audience will first enter a brightly lit reading room, where, presented on a laptop, is End Note, a supplementary information video that accompanies The Same Sun. Several pieces of data that are mentioned in the incidents of The Same Sun — the species of dinosaurs in the Crystal Palace, the weight of different objects found at the site of 9/11 — are presented here in cold and unequivocal figures, numbers in the scales of hundreds and thousands, which overwhelm any room for interpretation. Then, going down to the screening room in the basement, the audience views the principle work in an enclosed black box. In the video, the fingers of the artist appear and reappear, pointing to different locations on Earth millions of years ago. This indexical gesture suggests an absent body with the possibility of a higher perspective, as if the audience is an omnipresent God, traversing great distance and time over the million-year timeline in an instant. Despite this distant viewpoint, the absurdities of history become more evident. Under the same sun, why did invasion and violence against the other – human or non-human – take place time and time again? Regarding history over the timespan of millions of years, greater than the expected lifespan of a human being, the idea of a geo-body emerges, and with it the possibility to conceive the transcendence of nation state boundaries. The two different viewing environments and the large variation in time scale and number values in the works offer a new lens to reinterpret seemingly unrelated historical events. As a result, the sense of time is reshaped.
Jeremy Bearimy
In the TV series The Good Place, the timeline of the afterlife does not have the linearity that we would imagine. Instead, time flows following the contorted shape of the words “Jeremy Bearimy” as written in cursive English script. By using similar gestures to reinterpret the nature of time, and imaging new perspectives in which to sense the world, hibernatemode and The Same Sun allow viewers to experience the correlation between time and space. The order of time and space is rediscovered through moving images that visualize the interdependence of time with the vectors of space, and through sound installations in physical space, to reconsider modes of interpreting information.
In his book A Geology of Media (2015), scholar Jussi Parikka believes that deep time temporality not only provides a fresh view on the world from the perspective of the non-human, but also provides the Anthrobscene –the Anthropocene with its obscenity of the climate-crisis — with a solution. After all, by comprehending the world through our neutral systems, human beings struggle to think beyond the lifespan that our autobiographical selves inhabit, as we can only make speculations about the future based on the past. But, it is this same autobiographical self that is able to make images, literally and metaphorically, therefore aiding us to understand time and space through abstraction. If only we could comprehend history not from the perspective of linear progress, but with synchronicity, like the omnipresent assistant Jenny in The Good Place. The solution that image-makers must reach to confront the crisis of our current world — global warming, racism, economic injustice, and so on — is to understand the world, and existence, in terms of deep time temporality.
[1] 洪裕宏，《誰是我？意識的哲學與科學》， 時報文化出版企業股份有限公司，2016，190。
[2] Ibid, 192.
[3] 安東尼歐·達馬吉歐，《事物的奇怪順序》，商周出版， 2018，130。
[4] 洪裕宏，198.
[5] Zikri Rahman. “The Map, the Geo-body, and the Forging of ‘Thainess’: Interview with Professor Thongchai Winichakul“, No Man’s Land, accessed July 20,2020. https://www.heath.tw/nml-article/the-map-the-geo-body-and-the-forging-of-thainess-interview-with-professor-thongchai-winichakul/
[6] The Good Place, Season 3 Episode 4 “Jeremy Bearimy.” Directed by Trent O’Donnell. Written by Megan Amram. NBC. 18 October 2018.
[7] Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, (Minneapolis, the U.S: University of Minnesota Press), 44.
Image Credit: Su Yu Hsin, HIBERNATEMODE, 2019.
Antonio Serna, The Same Sun / Calendar: 345 Ma – Upper Suriname River, James River, Guinea-Bissau, 2:39, 2017.
