Alien Time
An Invitation to Time Travel
Series organised by Bridget Crone and Henriette Gunkel
Alien Time extends from the question of futurity to that of time travel. How should we understand time in an age of planetary complexity, outside of experience and in other than human scale? How should we consider time as “alien”, in what dimensions and for what purpose? What circuits, which routes take us to the future or the past? How are we to conceive of a form of time that enables a jump or jump-cut or splice, fast forward or rewind from this moment that we inhabit? Or, alternatively, how do we figure a time that is never itself complete but always underscored by another time and another space?
Ranging from the flicker to the fractal to the stack, as well as precedents from financial to AI and to physics we invite theorists, curators, artists and musicians to discuss the potentials for time outside time as we know it – alien time.
Please join us. Further announcements to follow.
Thursday 3 May, 6.30-8.00pm
The Deep: Learning, Time, Fake, State, Ecology
Benjamin H. Bratton
Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG02
In this lecture and discussion, Benjamin H. Bratton will consider the role/limits of aesthetics in modelling complex systems operating at scales that confound normal human intuition. Such models may include limited and conditional feats of abstractive (cognitive, technical, formal, figurative, gestural). He will draw together deep time, deep learning, deep ecology and deep states of various kinds: the emergence of intelligence from material complexity, post-Turing Test models of human-AI interaction, synthetic sensing at urban scale, inorganic semiotics, the inscrutability of artificial neural networks, multipolar hemispherical stacks, designing planetary governance and gradient citizenships, and the coupling / decoupling of past, present and future as foundations and alibis.
Tuesday 22 May, 5-7pm
Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 & Metric Mysticism
Zach Blas
Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG01
We are pleased to present the full-length version of Zach Blas’s film Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 alongside a related lecture-performance, Metric Mysticism. Followed by a conversation and audience discussion chaired by Bridget Crone.
Wednesday 23 May, 3-6pm
Towards a Black Sense of Time
sorryyoufeeluncomfortable reading group w. Professor Christina Sharpe
RHB 274
Join sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective for a participatory reading workshop around the theme of “a Black sense of time” with Professor Christina Sharpe, whose scholarship, for so many of us, is foundational for thinking through blackness and time in what Sharpe has termed “the wake”. There is no preparatory reading required for this workshop. To book your place, please send a very brief expression of interest (50-100 words) to sorryyoufeeluncomfortable@gmail.com by Monday 21st May.
Thursday 24 May, 2-4pm
Alien Time – Deep Time Trajectories
A PhD research workshop focusing on ‘deep time’ subjects.
Screenings, PhD presentations and discussion.
Room: TBC
This workshop invites PhD student to consider together deep time subjects in relation to their research and practice. This is an informal sharing session that is open to PhD students from different departments at Goldsmiths; it will include screenings, short (10-15 mins) presentations and an open discussion. If you would like to present your research, please contact Sam Nightingale (s.nightingale@gold.ac.uk) by Monday 21st May. There are a limited number of slots for presentations, so these will be allocated on a ‘first come’ basis.
If you plan to attend, but not to present, please send an email to Sam Nightingale so you can be advised of the room and final programme.
Friday 25 May, 10.30am – 7.30pm
Alien Time: An Invitation to Time Travel
RHB 256
Join us for a day-long discussion on questions of time unravelling through a series of individual papers / presentations, screenings, workshops and much discussion! Talks include Diann Bauer on xenotemporality – the necessity of alienation, Patricia Reed on optimist realism, Ashwani Sharma on sonic black holes/fugitive spacetime/(im)possible mourning, Ayesha Hameed and Henriette Gunkel on time travel and Bridget Crone on flicker-time. Free event. All Welcome.