Borrowed time: temporality and sounds of then

摘要

Sound manifests a temporal disconnect from the present, and in doing so offers new ways of thinking about time in an era where simultaneity and temporal ruptures are integral to an understanding of our lived experience. Daniel Birnbaum writes that ‘in the global omnipresence produced by today’s digital technologies, experienced time no longer follows a linear order of successive moments.’ Sound has the ability to simultaneously convey information from disparate temporal contexts, making artworks engaged with sound a useful medium for exploring new modes of temporality. This thesis contextualises my installation practice by aligning writings by philosopher Henri Bergson and art theorist Daniel Birnbaum with composers and sound artists whose works destabilise notions of linear time, such as La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt and William Basinski.Through discussing these interdisciplinary works in relation to my practice, four installation works propose new models of challenging notions of linear time, and certain recurring ideas emerge. The binary of stasis/flux is a model that, through sound, is used to enact the experience of timelessness and a continuous engagement with the present. As sound is always past, it is particularly suited to exploring ideas of re(de)generation, feedback and memory coalescing in the perpetual present. Through eradicating anything as definable as a present moment, Continuum paradoxically points only to the present moment. In contrast, Drum Room employs an infinitely repeating loop to challenge our traditional understanding of how the movement of sound describes space over time. Oscillator translates inaudible sound into two discrete ‘real time’ visual incarnations, and Mirrors summarises these ideas by manifesting sound as an infinite culmination over time, where no sound/all sound is now.