SI27
See you many times!
This trimester will be dedicated to researching the entanglement that binds together digital technologies with time, an inquiry that opens up as many philosophical questions as much as it offers material and practical examples.
Everyday digital and electronic devices are fundamentally bound to a time-sensitive and time-critical mode of existence: they are controlled by many temporal rhythms precisely regulated and counted: the gigahertz of the cycles of processors in computers and smartphones, the milliseconds that a data packet takes to bring its message to its destination, the refresh rate of a screen tuned to adapts to human visual perception...
This tight relation is in fact working in both directions: as much as computation and processes are regulated by time intervals, since already many decades precise time keeping has been fully delegated to computers. This circular relation, though, needs physical matter to be guaranteed: electrons and bits do not keep time in themselves, and need a physical materialization.
From the atomic clocks, the hyper-precise devices that measure the passing of time by observing the alteration of matter at the nuclear level, to the quartz crystals that are necessary for precise time measurement and time functioning in any electronic circuit or computer, matter is always entangled in this recursive relation between electronic functioning and time regulation.
While these sound like very scientific and technical matters, at the same time the question of time management is a very social and political one, that contributes to define the industrial and post-industrial societies and economies we live and work in. Regulating the societal relation to time is an operation charged with governmental aspects, so we won't shy away to understand how and when it happens.
WEEK 1: time as material - time as rhythm - time as control system - time as perception
Monday 7 April
10-17: Special Issue
WEEK 2: What happens when we refuse linear time as we know it?
Monday 14 April
10-17: We take a look at the politics of time, crip time and timezone protocols
WEEK 3: visit to telecom museum
Tuesday 22 April
10-17: tracing the history of communication and time regulation. By Exploring networks, signals, and delays we look at how information travels through time and how machines keep time.
May Vacation
MAY VACATION
WEEK 4
Monday 12 May
10-17:
What does it mean for a device too "run out of time"?
coming sessions we take apart e-waste, examining the material traces of obsolescence, extraction, and repair
WEEK 5
Monday 19 - Tuesday 20 May
10-17: visit to e-waste facility tbc + quartz session
WEEK 6
Monday 26 May
10-17: Special Issue
WEEK 7
Monday 16 June
10-17: Special Issue
WEEK 8
Monday 23 June
10-17: Special Issue
WEEK 9
Monday 30 June
10-17: Special Issue