User:Kiara/Special Issue 27/Time is not my friend

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Crab.jpg

Child in Time

Since I was a child, I’ve always been daydreaming. I was always more away in my head than present in the room.

It obviously led to being late copying the board in class, being late for school and wrongly estimating the time needed to achieve a task or to get somewhere.

Growing up, I learned to fit in and catch up before being late. Masking.

Now, adult, managing myself not according to academic expectations, it is coming back in a different form: I zone out a lot and lose focus.

I get better at estimating time but I also recently discovered, through that Special Issue 27: See you many times, that I actually cannot perceive time. Just as I cannot perceive space –as in distance, measurements, perspective– time remains a mystery. It goes slow or fast, but it never stops to rest. We frame it into watches and clocks of all sorts, calendars and timetables. We constantly try to regulate it, but it is really regulating us. Weird.

Penny Dreadful

Humankind invented the concept, the idea, the calculation of time in order to keep track of it. Maybe because it never waits for us. And with that, time became a shadow over our heads that pressures us at every step we take.

And then, as men try love to conquer, master and colonize, they try to gain that power over time itself.

Think machines, the ones that were made in the Middle Ages; to make labour more simple and EFFICIENT [efficiency is all about time]. Then, fast forward to the 1800s, computers. To calculate, write, decode, create… And fast forward again: cars! always faster!

A little history time: setting computers in the 1800s is no coincidence. It is the period during which Ada Lovelace published her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which then led her to write the first computer program. Babbage’s machine did not work, nevertheless, Ada Lovelace managed to write a full algorithm for it that, we now know, would have worked. This work has been recognized as an early model for a computer and the description for a software!

On an outside note, she was also interested in mesmerism, a theory stating the existence of an invisible force possessed by all living things that could have physical effects, including healing. We’ll get back on that matter later.

Telefonistas.jpg

Later on, with the first telephone systems, women were employed as "Cable Girls" (switch operators) connecting the callers with one another. They were employed because of their voices being calmer, softer, soothing… With the globalization of home telephones, women became time-tellers: people would call the phone centers to have the time, before clocks. Obviously, the process was then automatized by a machine… with a womanly voice.
We now call them Siri, Alexa, Cortana. Rings a bell?

Systems that also exist thanks to a woman: Hedy Lamarr, who, besides being a great actress of her time, also co-invented a radio guidance system that allowed the creation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth! There is a documentary about Hedy Lamarr: From Extase to Wi-Fi.

Let’s look at the current world we live in. The techbros. They’re always in a "race" –race to dominate. Race against time.

A few (10ish) years ago, I discovered the existence of Elon Musk with a talk he gave. It was before he introduced Neuralink to the world, but probably a draft of it: a chip implanted in brains that would among other things allow humans to reach immortality. Applause. Wow. Is that cyberpunk?

I remember the discomfort watching that video gave me. Conquering death? And I can’t even get my hands on that video again. As if it vanished, or was merely an illusion…

Musk-ai-bs.png

So yes, men wish to conquer and as time goes by (with or without them) they get more and more frustrated by the idea of not being able to gain control over something they –in a way– created.

And those stories and ideas didn’t rise with modern sci-fi and technology. We can cite multiple stories: Frankenstein, Dracula, all the tales about Youth Springs, old witches eating children to stay young and beautiful… The list goes on. It has always been there. Underlying.

Defy death so you can control time.

On the other hand, fiction always brings us timekeepers that are men. Why is that? Is that a product of the frustration? Remember the Cable Girls? See the irony?

The Dark Side of the Moon

Meanwhile: women are the embodiment of time. We are regulated, literally, by cycles, we initiate and bear life. Maybe it is another reason why men try to enslave and –again– conquer us so much. And maybe you didn’t know about Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr; women are constantly being made invisible, especially for their work and contributions to tech advances. Which is exactly the point.

Humans invented a time calculation based on the sun. When it rises and when it sets frame a day. It is based on vision (sight), the amount of light we get.

When we dive into the history of calendars we learn that the first calendars were also looking at the Moon cycles. The earliest recorded attempts in measuring seasonal changes -basically time- show marking Moon cycles on bones; which led to creating communal calendars.

The Moon is a symbol of the invisible. It influences tides, nature and even the female body. But not only. Looking into western astrology, we all get 3 main signs: Sun, Moon and Rising (Ascendant). The Moon Sign is described as "the source of our emotional desires and our deeper inner life". It is literally the hidden part of ourselves.

The Moon is also strongly attached to witchcraft: the mystery and strong overall influence it has on nature make it one of the most obvious magical object. A witchy connection that can even be enhanced by using crystals and stones, just as clocks work best when using quartz!

In a nutshell, the Moon holds an invisible power over us, and over time.

Eventually, women get to synchronize their menstrual cycles with the ones of the Moon, achieving harmony with both nature and themselves… Remember Ada Lovelace’s interest for mesmerism? :)

Lost in Translation

A vocabulary of time…

Vocabulary of time.png

…and bearing meanings

  • Taking time (prendre le temps)
    • doing something without hurry or stress
    • also refers to something time-consuming: it takes time
    • also used as in "taking someone’s time", which comes with context. You can’t take time per se as it is not tangible. Also, you can’t take time from someone who is willingly giving it or sharing it with you.
  • Giving time ([se] laisser le temps, offir du temps)
    • allowing time to control, accepting a pace that you didn’t chose and can’t alter
    • offering time to someone/people
  • Sharing time (partager le temps)
    • this is how we should think of our interactions with the world and with people. It is love, care, paying attention ("paying"...hmm)
  • Wasting time (perdre du temps)
    • can we really waste it? Again, as it is not tangible and not really quantifiable?
  • Buying time (gagner du temps)
    • it is again a very pressuring phrasing, saying we need to go faster, to be more and more efficient
    • this sounds very capitalistic, yet we are not giving money to time. We are rather giving our time as a currency to every system that surrounds us (school, jobs, GAFAM, etc.)
  • Spending time (passer du temps)
    • we tend to use this phrase to describe something time-consuming, whether it be in a positive and fulfilling or a negative and pressuring way
    • it loops back (in English) to that idea of time as a currency…

The Door of Dreams

Watching a show where one of the main characters writes slam poetry, I thought of doing that for this text. I don’t know how to write poetry so I drafted something in a half-asleep state…

Slampoetry?.png

Outer Wilds

A dump of thoughts that crashed before hitting the final line.

Groundhog Day

Of course, mastering time is not only envisioned through immortality. There is also the wide concept of time travel. Think Back to the future, stories of "reliving the same day over and over again until you fix that one mistake", etc.

And those are only the obvious examples. I recently watched Inception and Tenet for the first time and, in their own unusual way, they also dig that subject of mastering, detaining time.

The Emotional Mathematician

Years after the hype, I got convinced by a dearest to watch both Inception and Tenet. I was never attracted to them, as I have a tendency to push away the trendy movies. And I never liked Memento so I assumed I wouldn’t like those movies either…

So, how did they convince me? you ask

"I would love to hear your opinion on them, I feel like you would have very interesting things to say."

Easy, yet nobody thought of it before :)

Tenet; watched: June 11 2025 // Inception; watched: June 10 2025

  • Tenet-notes.jpg
  • Inception-notes.jpg

Dolby Surround

Time is surrounding us so obviously it even overflows in music.

Notes pour trop tard

Special Issue 27: See you many Times took place from April to June 2025 in the context of the XPUB Experimental Publishing master’s course in Rotterdam and was conducted by Imane B. K. and Martino Morandi from Constant.

This zine is the result of a thought process that took place during the last 3 weeks of this Special Issue. It is framed in a very short span of time, which is quite ironic, let’s face it.

The different parts of this writing take their titles from cultural references, as listed below:

  • Child in Time; from Deep Purple’s song
  • Penny Dreadful; from the eponym TV series
  • The dark side of the moon; from Pink Floyd’s album
  • Lost in Translation; from the movie
  • The Door of Dreams; from Jesse Belle Rittenhouse’s poem
  • Outer Wilds; from the video game
    • Groundhog Day; from the movie
    • The Emotional Mathematician; a reference to how Guillermo del Toro refers to Christopher Nolan
    • Dolby Surround; all. around. you.
  • Notes pour trop tard; from Orelsan’s song (french rapper, the title means "notes for too late")

Images in the publication are screenshots I took and edited, or pictures/drawings I made.
Complete list of images: Photo of a photo taken at the Houweling Telecommuseum, Rotterdam; Screenshots of Elon Musk talking (YouTube); A drawing I made; Notes from my notebook; Screenshot of a note on my phone; Notes from my notebook about movies; Screenshots of time-themed songs (Spotify).

The publication is made using the Wikimedia API and paged.js.
The contents of this publication are licensed under CC-BY-NC and available on the PZI Wiki.

List of references used for the publication

Colophon
Writing & layout: Kiara Jouhanneau
Proofreading and advice: Damian Jansen
Fonts: Inria Sans (Black Foundry) & Isobare (Clémence Fontaine)

Quartz …and Cyberpunk

Quartz produces electricity when placed under mechanical stress (vibrations).

It loses very little energy in the process and is very precise, very common on Earth, so very cheap.

It is also used in computers and radios (alongside with clocks and watches).

Why is not at the heart of cyberpunk?

The cyberpunk imagery is filled with tech, body enhancement through cybernetics…is quartz too natural? too witchy?

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