Punctual Momentum

Punctual Momentum | On the dot, down the line
with Adam Feldmeth
Sundays, March 21-May 9, 2021, 11:30am-1:30pm PDT (UTC -7)
and or both
Tuesdays, March 23-May 11, 2021, 7pm-9pm PDT (UTC -7)
Spring 2021 Open Curriculum: Intersecting Architectures
Southland Institute

Poster Design: Quentin Gaudry

This 8-week seminar involves an ongoing discussion considering examples, historical and actual, drawn into confluence. The zoning of time, the moving image, Josef Müller-Brockmann's Visual Information System, rail travel, timetables, the tracking shot, and slow t.v. will inform the discourse. Gatherings will occur remotely. Respective of multiple time zones, two scheduled days/times are provided as options for those enrolled to choose from, either and/or both, each week. Please arrive promptly to class meetings having read, viewed, and given preliminary consideration to all accordant materials, updating our logbook along the way.

Significant attention has been dedicated to the geographic borders which subdivide the world with warfare and diplomacy largely being the determining factors throughout time, but what of time? A central focus of this seminar begins with the standardization of time zones in 1883, first applied in the U.S. with subsequent assignments conferred at a global scale the following year. This paradigm shift constituted a formalization of a new, temporal bordering directly tied to capital efficiency with imperialist undertones. The zoning arose from discrepancies which developed with the expansion of railway networks as the velocity of transporting people and goods began to collapse vast distances with a growing trend of confusion and collision in tow.

Similar to the way geo-location specifies one's whereabouts today, prior to train-driven acceleration, a person would commonly align time to their immediate environment through solar-localism. In our 21st century of cheap jet travel and the complementary Time Zone Change Syndrome (jetlag) which occurs in the crossing of vaster distances in shorter durations –in a year when distance learning and communal gathering become a more international affair with the world's populations encouraged to stay where they are in their temporal as well as spatial zones– it is not our bodies which carry the lag of displacement when we meet over these expansive distances, but our images which do, as we rendezvous through remaining in our respective locales.

How should these present conditions be tracked?

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