TIME FORMS EVENT MARATHON From High Tide to High Tide UC Digital Arts Research Network (UC DARNet) Saturday, April 20 - April 21 2002, Sunday @ CRCA/UCSD

A SERIES OF EVENTS CURATED BY CHARLES CURTIS AND ROGER REYNOLDS PRESENTED BY THE CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN COMPUTING AND THE ARTS, IN COOPERATION WITH THE UCSD DEPARTMENTS OF MUSIC AND VISUAL ARTS. THE SERIES IS SUPPORTED BY THE UCSD CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES AND THE DEAN OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES, AND THE UC DIGITAL ARTS RESEARCH NETWORK (UC DARNet).

One could consider forms which occur in the medium of time, as contrasted, say, with marble or flame. One could also think about how the passage of time itself inescapably forms our experience. Of those human activities that have been particularly devoted to the shaping force of time, music and cinema are of particular interest now. TIME FORMS juxtaposes musical statements in concert with filmic excursions.

Our experience of time is both inherently oriented, and externally dictated. Inherent orientations: metabolism, subjective impressions of duration, boredom, impatience, the biological "clock". External dictates: chronometric time, numeric (counted, as opposed to qualitative, or felt) time, time zones, schedules, workdays and workweeks.

Whereas external time forms may appear arbitrary, or at least invented, they form the basis of social order and social control, and take on a nimbus of inevitability. They are characterized by uniform size units (minutes, hours) which in various groupings (8 hours, 60 minutes) are said to be universally applicable. Inherently oriented time forms are of non-uniform size, and resist being comprehended in terms of unit, quantity, or sequence.

A point at which the two orientations may meet is in the so-called circadian rhythm, in which internal time-sensing responds to external time markers such as sunrise and sunset. While socially agreed-on time forms seek to roughly synchronize with patterns found in nature, no amount of adjustment of uniform-size units (leap years, leap minutes, abrupt time zone changes, daylight savings time) can remotely mimic the constantly-evolving and flexible attentiveness to time which a living organism has at its command. Biological "clock", as a figure of speech, is a misnomer; in the context of inherent time-sensitivity, the clock is a crudely plodding mechanism.