Temporal Aesthetics: Art as the Gear of Cultural Clockwork

Time is a consequence of subjectivity. Human consciousness, circumscribed from space and the cosmos, conceptualizes nature’s rhythms as elapsed time. If time is a subjective perception, then it follows that there are a several different ways to perceive time dependent on individual or cultural experiences.

Modernized western society, for example, sees time as teleological progression – as if time progresses towards an end goal. Eastern civilizations such as the Hindus of the Indus Valley society, on the other hand, have argued time is a cyclical process of creation, dissolution, and reformation.

You posses a preconceived notion of how time passes, but this isn’t something you picked up in grade school, was it? Far more likely that this perspectival interface with the environment was gradually internalized by the cultural milieu.

Take architecture, for example. Its very omnipresence, ironically, obscures the determined intention to physically erect the ideological underpinnings of dominant social structures. Exemplary architectural works such as the skyscrapers of Chicago illustrate the telos of reaching for the sky by focusing traversed space to a singular, upward zenith of progress.

We cannot experience a building without being it affecting our perception of time- the distance we stand from the skyscraper’s foot draws our attention to the upward goal that attracts, or inside the stairwells beckon us to move forward. The skyscraper is a beacon towards teleogical progress – every second is an opportunity to step onward and upward.

Film, often deemed a plastic art because of its ability to mould reality, recreates physical phenomena over elapsed time. Yet unlike the natural, film explodes time, offering opportunities to dilate, through slow motion, accelerate via elliptical editing, or synchronize through montage.

Film scholar Gilles Deleuze notes a paradigm shift in film technique after World War 2: an ontological response to the over-industrialization brought about by late capitalism, the excessive telos attached to technological idealism, all coalesce into the “time image” – rather than progress stories in real-time, many films pause to breathe for a moment and represent time itself as the object of the image.

Take Godrey Reggio’s film “Koyaanisqatsi”, for example – a film which combines long shots of cityscapes with rapid time-lapse effects over-simulating the frenetic pace of city life. Time imagism does not confine itself to a particular lens or strategy other than reflexivity – the self-conscious statement that imagery is secondary to the temporal means through which the imagery is being conveyed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ

Reggio’s film demonstrates that cultural paradigms can be challenged – he uses shots of skyscrapers and city life directed by telos, and through cinematic technique highlights the underlying cyclical essence within. Whether resistant, subversive, or hypothetical, “Koyaanisqatsi” is a film worthy of consideration because it breaks from standard cultural procedure into a new mode of experiencing time. This film is not just reflexive – referring to its own time-altering techniques, but meta-reflexive – highlighting a cultural logic of progress encoded through the art which the film depicts.