The Crackle of Contemporaneity

TY - CHAP

T1 - The Crackle of Contemporaneity

AU - Cox, Geoff

AU - Nolan, Ryan

AU - Prior, Andrew

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - There comes a time to move beyond asking the broad question “What is contemporaneity?” to consider more acute ways in which this question can be traced and signalled. We consider the notion of signal to be particularly appropriate in the consideration of contemporaneity, since signals are a constitutive element of contemporary infrastructures and our experience of time even if they are relatively undetectable. They operate underneath human perceptual thresholds as carriers, controllers, and codes, while also surfacing into perceptual and semiotic registers, as signs across various media—textual, visual, and, of course, sonic—all the while accessible as traces. Perhaps in this way it is possible to experience contemporaneity at a range of different scales— from the microtemporal to the planetary—to register both our closeness and distance from it (Agamben 2009), and to exemplify how times come together disjunctively in the present.

AB - There comes a time to move beyond asking the broad question “What is contemporaneity?” to consider more acute ways in which this question can be traced and signalled. We consider the notion of signal to be particularly appropriate in the consideration of contemporaneity, since signals are a constitutive element of contemporary infrastructures and our experience of time even if they are relatively undetectable. They operate underneath human perceptual thresholds as carriers, controllers, and codes, while also surfacing into perceptual and semiotic registers, as signs across various media—textual, visual, and, of course, sonic—all the while accessible as traces. Perhaps in this way it is possible to experience contemporaneity at a range of different scales— from the microtemporal to the planetary—to register both our closeness and distance from it (Agamben 2009), and to exemplify how times come together disjunctively in the present.

UR - https://lup.be/collections/ro_comingsoon/products/125493

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9789462701830

T3 - Orpheus Institute Series

SP - 97

EP - 114

BT - Futures of the contemporary

A2 - de Assis, Paulo

A2 - Schwab, Michael

PB - Leuven University Press

CY - Ghent

ER -