Time Stuff…

Hey gang when you have a moment to check these out please email me some comments and suggestions.

Happy Holdays! Thanks for all of your help.

Barron

Timeclock

 

Maker:

Five hundred porcelain cups are thrown on a wheel. The time they spend being hand crafted is recorded with an impressed stamp on each cup. The sequence is also recorded from the first made through to the last. When the cups are placed on the shelving they are set out in the order they were made.

 

Participant:

Approach an exhibit style installation. Guide ropes force you to begin at the appropriate spot. Read a long list of rules. Clock in to the exhibit and go around the corner. Select the next cup from the shelf. Keeping track of your time you put on safety apparel. You look down and the trash can already contains the previous cups’ shards. You pick up the hammer and smash the cup. It is over very quickly. Go back around and clock out. Sign your time card and put it in the rack.

 

Cycle, birth through to death. What is your role in this? Have you negated the creation? Do you remember what it was like, when you were in the process?

 

Entropy? The fight against.

 

Presentness, how to live in the moment.

 

My goal for the viewer is that they are able to slow down during that time affixed to the cup. I want them to become aware of the present, and actually live in the moment. So many of us do not know how to slow down and revel in the whatever thing is actually happening. The process is a tool for the participant. It is a trick to make them think about this small amount of time they are allotted. The death cycle of the cup. Studies show that people that find out they are soon to die live life to the fullest. Everything tastes sweeter, children are more precious, and nature is seen with eyes a new.

Einstein Towers

 

Towers are beginning to appear around me. These towers are a way that I work with or deal with time. I find that when I have a goal or a set plan in motion of a specific work that I can lose myself in the labor of it. The towers make use of this principle in my life. The original plan for the towers works from a scientifically proven way to take me out of our current time sequence. Einstein proved that the further we are from the center of gravity of the earth the slower time moves. Yes this is infinitesimal. Without an ultra accurate atomic clock we wouldn’t be able to see the difference from the bottom of the tower to the top, but I do think I feel it psychologically. Not only does the work of the towers become meditative and escapist, the tower itself is out of the time sequence and is an island unto itself. There is also a microenvironment when you are at the top, all perception changes. Sound is muted and heightened, sight is expanded and receded.

 

            I have discovered that the towers along with other projects have become a way for me to get centered. When I am doing the work it similar to meditation. It is a way that I separate myself from the outside world, almost as if stealing time. This time becomes wholly my own. I do not think about the list of things that I haven’t gotten done, I don’t worry about what happened yesterday; I am only there in the moment, breathing and being. I entrain myself with the rhythm. During these times I like to do things that require no abstract or analytical thinking. Whether I am hitting a board for an hour, walking north, or building a tower.

Presentness

 

Presentness is a state of being in which I am trying to be as often as possible. Throughout my work at UT I have experimented with the ways people move through their lives. With my picnic table piece I weekly raised the levels of the tables in which people daily sat. I was wondering if mentally they could slow down enough to notice that there physical nature between themselves and the seat was different than it had been before. Of course they did not. We have been trained to live in a super fast paced world. In this fast pace we do not have the ability or the time to slow down and notice. In my display box piece I was hoping to set up a type of viewership similar to a television show. Everyday at the appointed time for one hour I was in the case working. Each day the piece inside grew and the same people came by and watched the progress. In a way I was tricking them by using their own habits against them. They have been trained to sit on the couch and watch a half hour or hour television show, and with that escape their surroundings and see something. I simply replaced a sitcom with an installation. 

 

Change…

Time, Change, Life, Movement, Consciousness; this list of synonyms. All of the words are the same thing and in most ways are interchangeable. Change is constant. Time is constant. Living is continuous, movement is continuous, and Consciousness is continuous. If any of the terms listed stopped they would no longer continue to be what they are defined as. This is about real duration.
“Things change.” Ron Hall
When my father said this to me as a teenager with unfulfilled expectations, I did not understand what he was saying. Since then and in many different ways I have come to see these two words in a new light, with overarching consequences on the whole of existence.
We have no ability to get out of the flow of the terms mentioned. We demonstrate them with lines but a line cannot define the terms’ unending ness. Time cannot be stopped. Movement cannot be stopped. As stated above the very instance you stop movement it ceases to be movement.
So, we cannot stop time, change, consciousness, etc… but we can change the way these things flow i.e. we can slow down time or speed it up. Through intelligence or experience or other ways we can change the quality of our consciousness.
The bible talks about how God sees time and our lives. It says we have free will, but it also says God can see our whole life at once. He knows what decisions we will make. God is omniscient and he is outside of time, so I believe that the way he sees our lives is consistent with science’s view of how time and free will works. God cannot change the past, once a decision is made it is over, but the next moment has infinite possibilities.

Currently Reading:
Self and Process, The Brain State and the Conscious Present, Jason Brown
Key writings, Henri Bergson
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, Ranochandran
An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks
A leg to stand on, Oliver Sacks
Dance for Two, Allan Lightman
Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change, H. Wilson Carr
The Creative Mind, Henri Bergson
The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius

Current Projects:
I am hitting a 2×4 for an hour at a time five times a week. I am interested in the change and progression that will happen in the board and my hand over a period of time. I am using my left hand in a karate chop style. I am documenting throughout.
checkout out my progress at www.barronart.net/2007.html

I will start soon a similar project in which I will walk across a nearby rugby field from corner to corner for an hour at a time. I will be document the process.

I am also beginning to build a tower on our outdoor patio at the grad ceramic studio. According to Einstein the further away from the Earth’s surface you are the slower time moves, so I will try to build a tower as high as possible so that I will extend my life.

Similarly to the last project I am searching for the highest points of land near where I live. I plan to travel to these points for the same reason of getting as far from the Earth’s center of gravity as possible. (Clingman’s Dome, Mount Mitchell, etc…)

Time, rant…

Time is said to be a river flowing into the future. The rush of this torrent is said to be so strong that we are less than pebbles thrown into the mighty moving water. A river implies that there are boundaries for the water and that someone on the banks of the river may have an altogether view of events as they happen.
This is saying that something or someone might be out of time not part of the river. Physics tells us that there are certain particles that are not affected by time; in fact some of them appear to go back in time. The math of physics also tells us that there is no reason that the models of the way space and time operate would not be reversible like any other standard math problem. Does that mean time is reversible? I doubt that, but I do think that time is not what we think it is. Time is flexible, it is another dimension just as the third dimension is and allows us to interact with our physical world. This is evidenced in the different ways we experience time. When we are stuck in a long line at the DMV waiting to renew our driver’s license, we look at the analog clock on the wall at the far end of the room and for an instant the second hand appears to be stuck. In another instance we get a new book from our favorite author and we can’t wait do dive into it, we cuddle up in bed at 10:00 pm and begin reading. The story begins, the characters start developing, the foreshadowing of events to come, we look up at our digital alarm clock and it reads 3:45 am! What? Time has just sped up in our mind. We have no sense of how that time moved in the real world, in our book of fiction months have passed, but surely it is around midnight and I can expect a good nights sleep.
Time appears to be tied up with our conscience mind. When a coma victim wakes from his sleep he is unaware of the amount of time that has passed. It is similar when you sleep, you do not actually feel the amount of time you have slept consciously, although you might feel them physically because your body has been refreshed. People try to change the way they perceive time in many ways. Meditation is a way to try to slow down time and feel it as it passes. Certain drugs are said to help you experience time in different ways. How can we change the way we experience time? Some cultures that have not yet been “civilized” do not use clocks. It is not in our too distant past that we did not use clocks and calendars as well. Time for someone in these cultures is experienced very different. For instance if you were visiting and inquired as to what time you would be having dinner, they would say, “now”. To you or I this would mean immediately, but to some of these cultures “now” is not about immediacy, but instead is about the activities that are progressing. That is to say that now means we are working on dinner currently, we will not be doing anything else currently except getting dinner prepared. This means it might take in our time 2 to 3 hours, but for them “dinner” is “now”.
This culture sees time as a series of events, or moments. This is a view of time as a sequence, and it appears that this is likely how time really works, individual points of time laid out in a sequence. Each moment in a time sequence is equally valid and weighted and all moments have happened, are happening and are going to happen. The direction or arrow of time does not appear to be essential either, but more a construct of the conscience mind. It seems that the only importance is the sequence not duration.

You say WIIFM? Or what’s in it for me? The hope is that you make an attempt to step outside of time, or try to see around time. Do we live our life on the clock? Do we say I have 10 minutes to complete an activity, and then at 3pm I have to go and do this other thing, etc… I find this absurd. Of course in our current spot on the time sequence much of the human race is ruled by time. We would have to go through de-conditioning to take away our need for order and schedule. Some of us are able to maybe take a week out of a year to go on vacation, and maybe for some of that we are able to step out of the time sequence but often we try to cram as much into 12 hours of sunlight as possible while on that vacation. What makes that different than working, or the normal everyday grind? We have dissected our duration of living. Birthdays, anniversaries, seconds, minutes, and hours are ways of measuring experience. Does experience need measure? Is it not self supported?

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