Images of temporal diversity at the limits of unstable globalisation

Technologies of speed, penetration and compression now enable images to be created, stored, mined, circulated and erased in new ways. Discoveries from astronomy to geology and computing expand human horizons while programmes of extractivism are prolonged in material, social and psychic worlds. The regime of data visualization that fuels contemporary science and markets alike naturalizes its authority over the representation of the present and the collective vision of species’ pasts and futures. Restrictions on our physical mobility and social habits in the current conditions of the pandemic confirm the vulnerability of our perceptual systems but also their capacity to transform.

This paper envisages time beyond the exhausting and entropic image regimes that drive dominant forms of industrial and networked modernity. It does so through a series of studies of visual artworks featured in exhibitions that I have staged as artist-curator and initiator of The Habitat of Time (2018-). This international research project explores rapids shifts in our experience of time produced by the current conditions of unstable globalization. The durational, digital, sculptural and installation artworks explored in this paper have been presented at Arts Catalyst London (2020), Casula Powerhouse, Liverpool NSW (2018) and Artspace Sydney (2017). They demonstrate the ways in which artists conceive of new matterings of the image through their transdisciplinary research and speculative practice at the intersection of art, science and technology. In this expanded field, images show up as entanglements of material, social and perceptual forces, conveying the interdependency of human and more-than-human worlds.