Temporal Secessionism

The entanglement of capitalist modes of production, time measurements, and consensus systems is for us an ongoing research field, beginning with the question of how to formulate a generative and affective position towards decentralized ledgers as new forms of temporality, and/or new temporal regimes. According to (post-)Kantian epistemology, time arises within (and is constituted by) the boundaries of a subject’s cognitive apparatus. As we increasingly rely on time systems based - either conceptually or mechanically - on different technological strata, we must also realize that these systems make explicit the fact that time - far from being a single objective metric of reality - is a socio-technological construct: a way of forming consensus regarding our accepted version(s) of reality and the ordering of events in it. If the process of creating time systems (and the mechanisms by which we count them) is always bound to social or technological processes (themselves stemming from our base cognitive apparatus), many questions arise: how do different time systems reliant on metrics outside of the dominant one arise?

What mechanisms are already in place to create different modes of time calculation and management? On a broader scale, how do these temporalities co-exist and affect each other? Examination of existing metrics reveals various systems already at work at the core of technical infrastructure today: differing consensus-finding mechanisms as differing mechanical temporalities, all running parallel to each other. As we have written elsewhere:

The development of timekeeping practices from sundials through to mechanical and digital clocks, alongside the ever-increasing precision of digital clock-time, can be mapped to progressive instantiations of globalised capitalism’s control mechanisms in a manner that is both fairly non-controversial and the subject of extensive historical analysis and research. As such, this will not be our focus here. The development and instantiation of blockchains and DLTs - the focus of our efforts in this brief text - appear to have upending the power distribution of the post-Y2K digital, globalised time cyberspace: time, instead of being passed down a tree of hierarchies unilaterally from centralized timekeepers to other digital machines in a network of temporal command-and-control, is now produced as the outcome of equally permissioned network nodes participating in a series of games in order to agree on a shared history, referred to as consensus.

In the last two years we have created a series of temporal secessions in collaboration wirh Amy Ireland via objects resembling digital clocks. The mechanics of these objects stem from explorations of the confluence of computer science, mysticism, and decentralised technology. They were placed in the 7th Athens Biennale and the ISKRA DELTA: The 34th Ljubljana Biennale Of Graphic Arts, and functioned as catalysts for a different experience of the passage of time.

The resulting sculptures - Timezones 1, 2, and 3 - displayed a webapp streaming data from various data sources including a simulated Paxos Algorithm, Mined Blocks and Transactions in the Bitcoin Network, and the fluctuating frequencies of a simulated quartz crystal. They also tried to map existing temporal infrastructure onto a familiar scheme of time counting - the surface and hands of a clock face.