The time before my stay as a Visiting Researcher stretches vastly before me, millions of sensory experiences and inputs and outputs lie between here and then. I am in my office now, in front of my screen, writing a methods chapter for an article on ideologies of futures, sorting out ideas and concepts, finding references, revising another article, moving forward though I am of course sitting very still as academics tend to do, writing this blog… This is already the past. Temporal suction will soon have applied its force and I will be sitting at the other side of my stay at Sisters Academy, tumbled through its parallel universe. I see the ruins of my future, go back to them and touch them with awe. At the other side…of this life. Temporal suction will have applied its force and I will be sitting at the other side of this life, in a flash and an aeon.
Besides engaging poetically with life and death and morphing times, my research more academically spoken revolves around the role of rationalized time in late modern societies (think means and ends, economic performance, human activity as instrument for market growth). I argue that we need new modes of engagement with time, if we are to take seriously the ecological and social disruptions that we already live in and will certainly be affected by in the not so far future. Yup, I am critical and indignant at the state of humanity in this unsettling and transitory period from the paradigm of rational economic growth and the strange cramps of late capitalism, to whatever may come instead. No doubt our time will be subject to great historical interest and amused wonder in 500 years, or just 200 years perhaps. If the human race survives that long, that is. … But critique will only get us so far. So my research also brings with it a quest to investigate what other temporal activities and identities we may form, which can counter, supplement, play with existing rational temporality.
During my stay at Sisters Academy I will investigate this – explore my own temporal fringes and evoke time together with the students that are sent to me. I think we will play in the ruins of our futures, stand so still that we stop time, perhaps even cry as we feel time wash through us.
I will enter into this exploration as Traveller…I travel from the dark and into that one night’s lodging at a wayside inn, called life. Treasure every moment, touch, sip of beer that the innkeeper serves and the smells and sounds of fellow guests, knowing that I will travel back into latency in a day’s time, extending the minutes with you and everything out of time. Sometimes that’s all I and we get. Sometimes my entry stretches across 10.000 years, we breathe winds of eternity and watch as everything transforms and something somehow stays consistent, watch history and love and loss repeating and the earth shake and settle. I walk across the lands of being and time. I can’t wait to meet you and embrace. Imagine that: we are alive at the same time.