杏吧原创

Smithsonian鈥檚 Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, until 6 April 2015. Free entry.

Rock concert (Image: Su-Mei Tse, 尝鈥椭肠丑辞, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. 漏 Su-Mei Tse)

An exhibition and two books show how technology is changing our interactions with time

Come to Washington DC, and the first work you鈥檒l see at the Hirshhorn Museum鈥檚 Days of Endless Time exhibit is Su-Mei Tse鈥檚 2003 video 尝鈥椭肠丑辞, in which we see the artist sitting on a clifftop overlooking the Swiss Alps, playing the cello. She plays a short passage and then pauses, listening as the music echoes back from the mountains.

It鈥檚 a piece obviously designed to trigger a sense of contemplation and atemporality, and as such seems the perfect opener to a show that 鈥� as part of the Smithsonian鈥檚 40th-anniversary celebrations 鈥� features artists bringing 鈥渟lower, more meditative forms of perception鈥� to 鈥渁 world conditioned by the frantic, 24/7 flow of information and the the ephemerality of digital media鈥�.

But something doesn鈥檛 sit quite right: her dress seems somehow a little too red, the grass on which she sits impossibly green. The video 鈥� like all 14 of the moving-image installations that make up Days of Endless Time 鈥� has been digitally manipulated, with its colours tweaked and frame rate adjusted. The result is a sense of hyper-reality. There is a slowness and contemplation that feels just as ephemeral as the digital mediascape the exhibition aims to critique.

Something similar can be said of Eija-Liisa Ahtila鈥檚 Horizontal (2011), in which footage of a huge wind-buffeted spruce tree has been caught by cameras at different heights and then projected on to a wall at a 90-degree angle. The result is a near life-size rendering of the tree in a way that鈥檚 hugely unfamiliar to the human eye, presumably with the aim of making the viewer take the time to watch a familiar symbol of nature in a more contemplative and abstract way. The by-product 鈥� whether intended or not 鈥� is that the tree seems incredibly artificial.

Thinking time

The whole exhibition鈥檚 aim is to make you slow down and encourage you to spend more time watching the works. But the longer you spend with them, the more one鈥檚 attention drifts from their subject to the technology and techniques used in their creation.

More effective 鈥� perhaps because it鈥檚 one of the few works that addresses the medium it was created in 鈥� is Siebren Versteeg鈥檚 (2005), a self-portrait in which the artist checks his cellphone while his image disintegrates into pixels that shift back and forth between two LCD screens. Instead of slowing down nature to make us contemplate, Versteeg slows down the digital image itself, forcing us to take a long look at the flows of data that surround us.

It is interesting to watch how other visitors to the Hirshhorn react to an exhibition about how modern life gives us little time to stop. People march past the installations, barely giving them a glance.

I wait patiently behind someone to read a description of a piece, only to discover she鈥檚 merely standing in front of it while texting from her smartphone. The idea that networked technology has taken away our thinking time and forced us into a constant state of anxious reaction is explored in a number of recent books.

Judy Wajcman, professor of sociology at London School of Economics and author of Pressed for Time, says it wasn鈥檛 always meant to be this way. 鈥淣ot so long ago, commentaries about post-industrial society predicted a 鈥榣eisure revolution鈥� driven by automation in industry and the home,鈥� she says.

Instead, she argues, our lives have accelerated along with the speed of our machines 鈥渁s if the exponential growth in computing power predicted by Moore鈥檚 law applies to every aspect of modern society鈥�.

The slow must go on

Wajcman argues that this acceleration is less the fault of technology and more to do with the strains placed on us by consumer capitalism. Our sense of always being rushed is a result of the goals, priorities and demands we place on ourselves: 鈥淏eing busy is now a necessary condition of a fulfilling lifestyle.鈥�

Mark Taylor鈥檚 Speed Limits takes a more historical approach, aiming to be an account of how developments in technology, finance, industry, fashion and philosophy have led us to a point where 鈥渢he acceleration of life is rapidly approaching the tipping point, where there inevitably will be social, political, economic鈥� and ecological meltdowns鈥�.

It鈥檚 hard not to wonder if there鈥檚 a generational aspect to both his and Wajcman鈥檚 analyses. Both are 鈥渂aby boomers鈥�: now in their sixties, they have lived through one of the most rapidly transforming eras of human history. Do today鈥檚 teenagers, some born since the turn of the century, feel the same loss of time as Wajcman and Taylor? Or has technology, far from robbing them, simply given them new things to do with their spare hours 鈥� things that seem unfamiliar to older generations?

Perhaps this isn鈥檛 about a lack of time at all, but about how we use it, how we value it, and how we choose to gleefully, enjoyably, waste it.