Keeping Time

Keeping Time, is a speculative, artistic project that aims to reimagined our interaction with more than human temporalities. It questions how attention to the paces, rhythmns and cycles of other beings might effect the ways in which we perceive climate change and the collective response required. Through artistic experiments in interactive sculpture, I am exploring how the embodied and experiencial qualities of sculpture can be used as a medium through which to pose these questions.

◎Proposal◎

Through the design of 3 biomimetic, kinetic sculptures I want to create an immersive installation where the rhythmns and movements of 3 natural cycles are brought into our space and can be experienced in an embodied and emotionally resonant way.

Image taken of Theatrum Anatomicum by Jiawen Gong

The installation will take place in the Theatrum Anatomicum here at Waag Futurelab. As participants move through the space, they will feel their own presence subtly disrupt and change the pace of the movements around them due to the placement of proximity sensors. This looks to highlight the temporal lag through which ecological disruption is experienced and instead create an intimate and direct interaction. Through this I hope to pose questions about our entanglement with the temporalities of the living beings around us.

The form and movement of each sculpture will be based on a cycle found in nature.

• The first is from the land exploring the blooming and seeding cycles of plant communities.
• The second is from the sky, inspired by the migratory cycle of birds.
• The third is from the sea, drawing inspiration from the cycles of growth in Whalefall ecosystems.

On a poetic level and in order to encourage connection with the sculptures, I have named each one after a female figure from mythology that relate to these cycles.

• Daphne
• Philomel
• Amphitrite.

All three characters metamorphose from human to more than human form in their stories and therefore play a conduit role in my installation.

Through this I want to explore the felt experience created by living in a time of climate emergency, when our synchronicity and attunement with nature are changing and our ability to perceive disruption to non-human communities is limited. Through speculation and imagining otherwise I want to reframe the viewfinder and hope that Keeping Time can be the catalyst for conversation about how climate change produces material injustices for human and more than human communities.

❖Context❖

""Shylights", Studio Drift (2023), "La Nina, Migrations", Marguerite Humeau (2022), "Clearing", Marguerite Humeau (2017), "Worried? Us?", Bill McKibben, Granta 83 (2003), Mind maps and notes by Isobel Leonard (2024)

My initial conception of this project came from stumbling across Bill Mckibbons article "Worried? Us?" in Granta 83 [^1] in which he poses that we are "fatally confused about time" when it comes to our planet. He poignantly describes the contrast between our cultural conception of our own time scale as a "demonic fast forward" dominated by exponential growth and rapid consumption vs the inherently stable, accretional conception of earth's deep time. **The seperation here making it difficult for us to concieve of our impact and entanglement with planetry timescales and contributing to confusion and climate apathy. He closes his article with the remark:

"the contrast between 2 speeds is the key fact of our age: between the pace of which the physical world is changing and the pace at which human society is reacting to that change."

My dominant feelings reading this article was sadness, but also a strange understanding of a feeling that characterises my own climate anxiety. One that shifts and swells from complete avoidance and disinterest one moment to complete urgency and existential fear the next.

This speaks to the contradictions many have pointed to in our narration and perception of Climate Change as both a slow emergency and an urgent crisis, something that is coming but already here. It describes the different speeds of climate change and temporal lag felt between human and non-human communities, which is hard to reconcile as it is largely imperceivable.

As Barbara Adams poses in Timescapes of Modernity The Environment and Invisible Hazards (1998): [^2]

When things are invisible, a "temporal imagination is required".

An understanding of time as relational and dependant on our frame of reference is an amazingly speculative and hopeful concept to me. Its an opportunity to experience different perspectives of the present and explore potential futures. The idea that the time mechanism we deploy and the way we experience time passing etc. can make and remake what we value and give attention is the crux of my enquiry leading me to ask if different temporal framings generate different conceptions of the nature of climate change and the collective response required?

Through my artistic experiment I hope to have conversation about this, explore feelings and embodied experiences of living in the "contested and complex temporal frames of climate change" and how this relates to hope, agency and action (Keri Facer, 2024) [^3].

❦Research and References❦

Here are some of the the references that shaped my methodology and the way I wanted to approach this project:

More than Human Temporality

Firstly are other artists exploring ways of visualising and materialising more than human temporality:

1. Eva Bubla, "Designated Breathing Zone 3.0" (2024). Bubla's intervention in public space is interesting to me as it directs the view of the visitors to the “empty” sky and filling it with the sound of the air talking and the stories of the various organisms that inhabit it. I am inspired by how it directs attention and attunement through quite literally redirecting our viewpoint allowing us to stop and listen to the various lifeforms around us.

2. Katie Patterson's "There lay the days between" (2022) and "Fossil Necklace" (2013) which are both great examples of objects that materialise evolutionary time into tactile and relatable objects. I am inspired by how the mundane form of the objects really bring the geologicl magnitude of the subject matter into our space and our scale. Patterson very succinctly communicates that feeling of contrast between different timescales.

3. Grace Grothaus, Dawning (2023) a video installation which identifies the circadian rhythm as a chorus that all creatures on the planet participate in. Grothaus visualizes the canopy of the forest, affected in real time by live forest data, inviting the human to join into a rhythmic global song that connects all living things. This piece influenced me in the sensory way it visualises data and invites participation and interaction.

Similarly, some scholarship that really inspired my interest in more than human temporality is:

1. Peter Godfrey Smith, " Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" (2016) which explores what it might mean to live the distributed and muti directional experience of a octopus and how this may effect how they relate to time. This essay Octopus time by David Borkenhagen also explores this topic and its fascinating!

2. Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time Franklin Ginn; Michelle Bastian; David Farrier; Jeremy Kidwell is also interesting as it explores the challenges of thinking about deep time and looks to make it more tangible through exploration of how it manifests through places, objects, and practices.

3. Finally, A Sense fo Time on BBC Sounds by Geoff Marsh is fascinating as it goes into the science and philisophical value of trying to understand how other species percieve time.

Speculative Fictioning

Secondly, I am interested in practices of speculative fictioning which encourage us to imagine alternative worlds, and to ask questions about how we treat inhabitants of this one.

The idea that attentiveness to how futures and pasts inform how we percieve the present is owed to the scholarship and practices of Decolonial and Futures Studies. They interrogate what ideas are directing the futures we can envision and on what time scales.

Speculative fictioning can challenge linear temporalities and demand a revaluation of the choices we make between "present need, historic responsibility and future consequence" (Facer:2024).

1. Pakui Hardware, The Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024) is an immersive installation that projects and imagines the effects of an environmental inflammatory disease caused by current economic and social conditions. It speculates on the consequences of inflammation on the human and planetary body. This piece inspires me for the way it draws attention to the entwinement of human bodies and a planet in crisis through 1:1 scale, humanoid sculpture.

2. Simon Goritschnig, "Excavations from Unknown Origins" (2024). Goritschnig combines evolutionary theory with speculation about unknown life forms and alien worlds. In his fictioned worlds the man is a foreign body that intrudes into a habitat, questioning human impact on environments. I like the way Goritschnig leaves ambiguous the origins and nature of his object so it is open to interpretation and reinvention.

3. Arrivals, Denis Villeneuve (2016) is an example of science fiction that influences my work.

4. Marguerite Humeau's , FOXP2 at Nottingham Contemporary (2016) imagines a future where humans are not the centered species on earth. She builds a world in this installation re-enacting the moment when the gene FOXP2 mutated, allowing our ancestors to develop language. However, instead she speculates that elephants were the species to develop this gene instead of us and how their societies would look in terms of ritual and community. I am inspired by Marguerite Humeau in the way she creates experiences that completely decenter the human, I like the way she arranges her sculptures as if we were stumbling into a scene in motion.

Interactive Installation and Biomimetic Movement.

A main focus of my research is also examples of interactive and kinetic installations. I am inspired by practices that harness the embodied and emotional resonance of movement to explore our connection with nature. I am interested in the power of movement to create a tacit experience of subject matter and to explore feelings about our connection with our environment which are hard to put into words.

1. I adore Phillip Beesley's "Hylozoic Ground Canadian Pavilion" at the Venice Bienna (2010) I am inspired by how he created an interactive canopy which that reacts to human presence, appearing as if it is subtly breathing. I love how this creates a sense of the animate and a direct connection between the participants presence and the world they are encountering.

1. I always come back to Casey Curran's "Parable of Gravity" (2021). I am intrigued in how I creates such an immersive landscape and manages to elegantly disguise or incorperate the mechanisms. I am inspired by his use of laser cut duralar for the botanical forms as I like how delicate the movement is with this hard/soft connection.

1. Theo Jansen's Straandbeasts are amazing for their animacy and organicism of movement. It is interestng to me how he uses linkage systems to create ripples of motion through his beasts.

1. Shylights is also an all time favourite of mine since I saw it in "When forms come alive" at the Hayward Gallery in 2024. The way the silk is folded and sewn makes the movement even more dramatic and otherowrldly. I am interested in this work as an example of how soft robotics can create beautiful, biomimetic movements.

1. Finally, U-ram Choe's "New Urban Species" inspire me for the grace of movement achieved and intricacy of design.

Material Inspiration

Finally my material inspiration comes from uses of parametric design and 3d printing, alongside an interest in pleating auxetic structures and textile scaffolding.

First I am interested in the intricate, skeletal like structures achieved by Daniel Widrig. I am inspired by how he creates many organic forms from lattice like structures to amorphous, seemingly growing ones.

Similarly, designers such as Phillip Beesley and Yin Gao inspire me in their delicate treatment of soft materials and how they combine them with hardware and electronics.

[^1] Worried? Us? Bill Mckibbon, Granta 83

[^2] Timescapes of Modernity The Environment and Invisible Hazards, Barbara Adams

[^3] Educating the temporal imagination: Teaching time for justice in a warming world, Keri Facer (2024)