LIFE IN REAL TIME:
SLOW MOTION
Rodney Graham, Vincent Lavoie, Emmanuelle Léonard,
Klaus Scherübel, Jana Sterbak.
Curator : Marie-Josée Jean
From March 22 to May 26, 2002. Opening March 22 at 5.00 pm.
exhibition views
by Marie-Josée Jean
The inaugural event Life in Real Time is intended
to initiate a questioning of the social environment
to which current artistic practices are subjected. Its
project is to understand how a new perception of time,
characterized by simultaneous actions and instantaneous
effects, affects our individual realities1.
Two exhibitions address the tenets and results of this
new relationship with time. The artists in the first
exhibition remind us of the urban frenzy into which
we are plunged daily. As for the artistic practices
and the visual essay in the second exhibition, they
do not so much express the relationship with a uniformly
accelerated time as oppose and resist it by proposing
experiences of slowness. Finally, both exhibitions question,
in their own ways, the interaction between social time
and time as it is lived.
"Social time" refers to the temporal weft of professional
life, the school system, programmed recreation, and
vacations; it is cut up into weeks, hours, and minutes.
It is organized. To escape from this sometimes constraining
time, we must take our mind off the here and now and
escape into psychic time. Such absences emerge as intrusions
into the linear, programmed time of the quotidian. They
are manifested in a lack of attention or concentration
and suggest that we are completely absorbed by parallel
reflections or flashbacks. These little impromptu interruptions
represent a way for each of us to insert a bit of slowness
into this world of speed. They allow us to add time
to time by generating variable and individual speeds.
Simultaneous satellite transmissions, cell phones, and
the Internet have profoundly changed our relationship
with time, as well as our social relations, and this
no doubt explains why its representation is now predominantly
characterized by the perception of time condensed into
simultaneous actions. We have only to observe current
working conditions to note that we must in effect become
multi-taskers, performing a number of activities simultaneously.
But is this the only consequence of information and
communications technologies? It seems that today individuals
suffer waiting less and less gladly and get impatient
over next to nothing. This desire for immediate satisfaction
is explained by the habit of profiting immediately from
information found through new technologies and the Internet.
This generalized impatience also characterizes our conception
of time.
Stress is enlightening in this regard because it conveys
the effect produced by this impatience2. It
is linked to urban life and produces the feeling of
being incapable of performing a series of actions in
a prescribed time. The individual under stress finds
it difficult to bear the wait between the beginning
and the end of an action. For this individual, therefore,
speed represents an absolute that enables him to span
the distance between these two points. The wait becomes
unbearable when the perception that time is a distance
that can be crossed by using speed produces stress,
which tends to alter the intensive quality of the present.
Stress does enable individuals to respond to the pressures
of profitability and productivity to which they are
subjected3. However, the act of making time
profitable in a society in which notions of performance,
efficiency, profit, and hyperactivity dominate is likely
to affect negatively that society's individual members.
"Faster, always faster (to the point of absurdity),"
as Edouard Zarifian reminds us, "becomes a leitmotif."4
The components of this new culture of time - the immediacy
and pervasiveness of communications, the urgency of
things to do, the simultaneity of activities performed
- demonstrates how work time is expanding compared to
personal time. Today, everyone is overwhelmed by time
that's always going by too fast. We forbid inactivity,
we program our free time, we value ourselves more and
more by work and productivity. In short, we organize
our lives as we would manage a business. Does this really
mean that individuals today go more quickly? The speed
at which we transport ourselves, trade information,
and communicate suggests that we do. But, as Pierre
Sansot notes so justly, "People so rapid should, in
principle, accumulate an honorable little wad of free
time in which, finally, they could live for themselves
without worrying about an imposed task."5 By
all evidence, this is not what happens, since these
people live in a sort of time shortage, constantly looking
for a few instants in which they will be relieved of
their exhaustion. It's not surprising that many succumb
to this pressure and become depressed.
The forms of depression related to overwork are expressed
in exhaustion, sadness, withdrawal, and difficulties
with concentrating and acting. In other words, they
produce a generalized psychomotor slowdown: "The depressed
person, caught up in a time without future, lacks energy
and is engulfed in the idea that nothing is possible."6
This painful and inefficient psychomotor reaction summarizes
the difficulty of contemporary individuals have in adapting
to high speed. We may thus wonder if speed is not a
strategic manoeuvre that covers up a fear of boredom
and solitude, a fear of confronting oneself, or simply
the difficulty of living in the present. So that he
doesn't have to take his time, the individual forbids
himself to reflect, plan, wait, or hope. However, life
in real time can also be late-making and inactive, and
even unproductive. A slowdown in the pace of life gives
the impression of retarding productivity, while in reality,
it leaves room for relationships with others, planning
for the future, imagination, conceptualization, attention,
and reflection. Slowness isn't a synonym for laziness,
it is the sign of an individual's willingness to let
himself be swept up in an unforeseen event or unexpected
feeling.
This exhibition proposes various aesthetic experiences
that put to work "a technique of slowing," in Milan
Kundera's sense, by making each person take his time
in such a way as to enter actively into the questioning
that it raises.7 It is not the idea of image
time (slow motion, sped-up motion, narrative ellipses,
flashbacks, alternating montages) that this exhibition
questions but the relationship between social time and
psychic time. It reflects on the themes of productivity,
consumption of the image in real time, social responsibility,
difference, exclusion, solitude, the state of absence,
and factual depression. It places everyone in a position
of waiting, expecting, attention, silence, and sometimes
even impatience. The awareness of time is regulated
by the emotions of each individual, as Daniel Soutif
emphasizes: "Time waiting is certainly not the same
as time of love, hate, fear, or anger."8 This
reminds us that the speed of each aesthetic experience
is likely to vary as a function of the individuals experiencing
it. It is thus recommended that you take your time to
follow better the pace of the concept and the cadence
of the subjectivity.
1. Real time, a notion from the computer
world, means the telescoping of parallel realities so
that they interact simultaneously, with no delay, via
telematic mechanisms.
2. This description of the effects of stress is borrowed,
in part, from Luc Bonneville, L’impact des nouvelles
technologies d’information et de communication
sur la représentation de la temporalité
(Université du Québec à Montréal,
2000).
3. Profitability of time refers to maximum production
at a low cost, while productivity means to occupy the
totality of time.
4. Edouard Zarifian, “Les maux de la modernité,”
Le Nouvel Observateur: Génération
vitesse (special issue) (Mar.–Apr. 2001):
33. (Our translation.)
5. Pierre Sansot, Du bon usage de la lenteur
(Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2000),
p. 11. (Our translation.)
6. Alain Ehrenberg, La fatigue d’être
soi. Dépression et société (Paris:
Éditions Odile Jacob, 2000), p. 17. (Our translation.)
7. Milan Kundera, La lenteur (Paris: Gallimard,
1995), p. 49.
8. Daniel Soutif, “Exposer le temps à l’accélération
des vitesses,” Le Temps, vite (Paris:
Centre Georges Pompidou, 2000), p. 3.
credit : Emmanuelle Léonard
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