TROPOLISM

Last night at 6pm, the Guggenheim began its 24-Hour Program on the Concept of Time. Presenters included architects, artists, philosophers, writers, anthropologists, etc. Like any academic conference, lucidity and brevity comingled with pointless meandering. I suppose temporal musings may demand the non-specific thought processes that I saw last night and this morning. Below are highlights from the conference--at least the way I remembered and experienced the moments.

Continue reading and more pictures by roving New York City correspondent Saharat Surattanont.

1/06 18h 30m Ted Sider (philosophy)

elaborates on the physicists’ interpretation of time; that our past, present, and future selves coexist, but our experience is limited to a specific moment.

1/06 21h 15m Sanford Kwinter (architecture)

presents African quilts and African music as a means to deconstruct our established graphic patterns and temporal rhythms.

1/06 21h 45m Drew Daniel (music)

discusses the non-linear qualities of experimental music. “Music cures you of time….One listens for one’s ability to detect change…Music can be about testing the thresholds of pain”

1/06 22h 30m Lawrence Weiner (art)

felt that his role in the conference was to be “dog and pony act in an animal rights convention”; He talks about the temporal awareness of entropy but also finds time to slam Duchamp by telling us that changing an object’s context doesn’t make it art.

1/06 23h 15m Saskia Sassen (sociology)

Everyone experiences the exact same moment differently because of who we are, where we are and what we do. Embedded temporalities, allow us to bridge these difference through a shared experience, such as a “Wall Street type” buying lunch from a hot dog vendor---Two worlds collide….two worlds unite….

1/06 23h 55m Angela Bulloch & David Grubbs (performance)

A drummer, two guitarists, and a trumpet player—this was music that sometimes tested the thresholds of pain.

1/07 8h 45m Kevin Birth (anthropology)

feels that clocks are fascists objects that rules our lives. Historically, time has been linked to the duration of an event….how long it takes you to finish eating…how long it takes you to walk from one place to another. Modern measurements of time are arbitrary—the calendar is off by one day every 6,000 years. The atomic clock is off by about a second for every million years but it actually resets itself to the less accurate calendar system; Birth feels that the only way to accurately measure time is to divorce it from nature.

1/07 9h 15m Florian Idenburg (architecture)

is searching for integrated environments; how does architecture detail with a world that is in economic decline? Buildings that can last for a hundred years? Built in programmatic flexibility?

1/07 10h 05m Verne Dawson (art)

somehow made a connection with the lunar and menstrual cycles; a deck of cards somehow explains the seasonal changes in a year; Jack and the Beanstalk is somehow connected to predicting the solstice; that’s when I walked out….to be continued?