Chapter 5: Time and Space

Introduction

In this session, we will look at time and space. We will specifically investigate the way in which art and technology influence time and space – not only our conception of time and space, but the very phenomenon. We will look at several philosophical issues with time and space, relate those to our history as a species, and analyze their consequences in our contemporary society.

We start off with the 'emergence' of space (in the Heideggerian sense of the word) at the end of the paleolithic, when we contrast the wall paintings at Lascaux with big stone monuments found at southern Turkey. We will hear an echo of this emergence when we look at the way mechanical clocks started to find their way in society. And at the end, we will investigate whether these phenomenons are momentarily repeated in the virtual realm.

At the end of this session, we will hopefully have a more thorough understanding of why art is never 'just art', but a fundamental property of the very way we live our lives.

Literature

For this session, I want to bring in some of my own work: an article and a little documentary. I wrote the article for the Journal for the Philosophy of Games, but this journal was not as active as one might think. The documentary is part of the minor Design, Art, and Technology of Minerva Art Academy.

Barnard, B., 2020, Modern Dwelling. Unpublished manuscript, of which a pdf is (of course) easily available.