Alex Adriaansens / DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

Alex Adriaansens
Netherlands





DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?
"I know what time is as long as nobody asks me about it"
(Aurelius Augustinus, 4th century)

In 1894 a young French anarchist planned to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The Observatory was the icon for the just introduced global standardization of time which again was the expression of a far reaching rationalization of time expressed by the mechanical clock and the process of industrialization which synchronized production and labor to the rhythm of the clock. The rationalization of time and space was based on understanding our world as a mechanical clockwork were cause and effect are the rules. (Electronic) media are time based media, they deal with time in a flexible way as media time can be stretched, compressed, and delayed. Electronic media are time machines producing machine time. Electronic machines produce, as Paul Virilio states, fast time which is about the millisecond, it is time that exists inside the machine. It is the world of telecommunication and information flows. This time is very different from slow time which we can perceive within our bodily perception and which refers to the archive, memory and the spatial continuity of the city. Electronic media as video, television, radio, film and the internet are closely intertwined with our understanding of time, they reinforce our historical sense of time and function as a collective memory, they can record time. Our understanding and construction of history and memory is ever more related to the way we collect, organize, process and retrieve information from online archives and databases stored in electronic digital machines. In our digital and networked age, information in archives isn't solely a means to retrospectively look back into the past, it has also become an essential element for acting and interacting in the present. Nowadays we are living IN databases and archives since all our actions are monitored, stored, interpreted and used to predict future behavior of individuals and groups. The relation between fast time produced by electronic machines, with its flows of information and slow time - the time we can perceive with our bodily sensors - is closely related to contemporary forms of (social, cultural, political, biological) acting and interacting in between fast and slow time. Electronic media are the media of our time, they are in the heart of our modern society and create their own temporal realities. Understanding the working principles of media, and critically analyzing, deconstructing and reflecting our media realities has become a major part of contemporary artistic practices, they deal with the conditions of our modern technological culture. "Media-time is not apodictally bound to the stable, the fixed, or the certain. It is time that exceeds, extends, shatters normal perceptual limits, time freed of its parasitic dependence on the clock" (Timothy Druckrey in the catalogue Zone V2_, MOCA, Taipei, 2007)





Alex Adriaansens
He was one of the founders of V2_, of which he is the director. V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, is an interdisciplinary centre for art and media technology, since 1982. He curated several exhibitions amongst which Zone V2_ (MOCA, Taipei), Interact or Die! (DEAF), Information is Alive (DEAF), the Dutch contribution for In the Line of Flight (Millennium Museum, Beijing). He has been giving many talks and presentations all over the world at different occasions (universities, symposia, workshops, expert meetings, academies a.s.). He is a member of the Advisory Board of Transmediale, Berlin, the Berlage Institute - an international research centre for architecture in Rotterdam, and the Piet Zwart Institute MA programme in Media Design Research in Rotterdam. He has been an advisor for different institutes and organisations (governmental and non-governmental). He has been a member of different juries for international media art festivals and prize awards.

www.v2.nl