Reproducing the past, alienating the body — digital time and reenactment
pp. 65-68
in: Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, Wolfgang Fiel, Margarete Jahrmann, Ruth Schnell (eds), New realities, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Digital revolution relentlessly reshapes the balance between the internal feeling of time and its social objectification. As we will see immediately, it seems that time has "taken revenge" on space in the passage from first to second (or late) modernity; but this doesn't mean that the gap between objective and subjective time, which marked the birth of the modern age, is beeing bridged. The "real-time" of network communication is in no way more tuned in with our feeling of duration than was the time exactly beaten by the clocks of the industrial revolution. In the very first age of capitalism until the Fordist period, a sort of "temporalisation of space" took place through the concept of velocity. The more and more increasing speed of the means of transport entailed a reduction of distance, and this involved the ability to appraise ever-shorter space intervals, through the measuring of the time intervals taken to cover them. From 1880 to 1915 (as Stephen Kern widely showed), relationships between space and time were ruled by the concept of simultaneity.