Asynchronous Glossary

Biological Time (a time of permanent waiting)

The time of the body, of the cells, of life, is a time filled with waiting, transitions, and permanent processes. It does not understand punctuality. Even though it has a circadian rhythm, there are no losses or gains and consequently, it is not in a hurry nor does it need to hang back. Biological time clashes with the conception that has been with us since the industrial revolution, one that leaves no room for waiting, stopping, or resting because these are associated with unproductivity, with the impossibility of attending to the frenetic and tireless rhythm of machines. From the point of view of biological development, however, time can’t be lost and thus there can be no value judgments or accounting of time. In capitalism, body time confronts machine time.

Simultaneity

The simultaneity we face through connective ubiquity leads us to experience different temporal and spatial realities in the same vital spectrum. That is, we can do two things at the same time by mixing online and offline, we can listen to two sounds coming from online and offline sources, transport ourselves via the Internet or IRL to remote places far from each other, etc. Isn’t simultaneity like astral travel in which one can consciously wander through sleep, activating our capacity for thought that is supposedly only available to us when we are awake? This ability to connect both online and offline offers a spectrum of new experiences that, together with the idea of ​​a body of data as a reflection or representation of a body, brings us closer to the concept of trans-specific. A person becomes, through the ability to experience different realities at the same time, and through the transformation into other shadows of their own being, such as in a body of binary data, a trans-specific being, a mixture of hybrid species between cables, skins, screens, hairs and satellites.

A New Time (A New World)

A change of experiential paradigm, such as the possibility of simultaneously experiencing two different realities that occur at the same time in different places or in the same place at different times, implies a change of experience, an evolution of the senses and a new understanding of them. Likewise, it implies a change of media, a change of devices and a change of the subjectivities that they involve. A new conception of the idea of ​​time is needed to accompany today’s simultaneity, the possible layers of digital superposition that now surpass any past era.

Delay

As trans-specific beings intervened by telecommunication mediating machines, we live in the constant instability of connections, latency, delays, crashes and glitches. Errors slip through tiny holes in our connected cable and they do so, contrary to what one might think, silently and discreetly. We do not perceive delays when sending messages, instead we have developed an awareness of immediacy in a world conditioned by delay. Thus, the construction of the idea of ​​hybrid, online/offline life is based on a fallacy. Technological prosthetics allow us to attend to more stimuli at the same time and this makes us more like a machine, deepening trans-specific agency. However, along with a greater awareness of simultaneity in the digital context, there is a greater clash in relation to delay: if capitalist industrial time imposed punctuality as the only form of temporality in monochronic societies (the societies of the global north), the flip side of this was the demonization of delay, of waiting, of unpunctuality as these all imply a loss of capital. Even so, delay is permanently present in machine dynamics and it forces peoples’ patience, desynchronization and adaptation to other multiple (biological and non-biological) rhythms. Paradoxically, then, with the imposition of the permanent use of digital technology and the network in a context of confinement, the experience of waiting returned (with the first modems or the first Skypes), and we had to relearn delay. Perhaps it is worth proclaiming the following imperative: it is urgent to vindicate technical and human failure because it reveals the artificiality of perfection and the impossibility of permanent synchrony. It is an imposition on the diversity of temporal agency that we might have forgotten in previous years.

(Imposing) The Digital Wait

To receive an email and, unless it is an emergency (if it were, you would call), to let a few hours go by, even a day, to reduce the pressure, to slow down the interaction, to resolve some pending issues before responding. Although it is not a very popular way of proceeding, the intention behind it is pedagogical, a certain need to regain control of time while respecting one’s own time. Or at least to start the debate, to see if there is any consensus about how one’s own times pushes us into the abyss of immediacy. One of the greatest barriers to the real and effective understanding of digitalization is precisely that we do not get to experience the speed of information processing because it is too fast for sensory perception. Curiously, though, the electrical impulse that makes our body work also has temporalities that are externally imperceptible by our senses. The bit resists us and the speed of light closes the distance between human time and the machine time. For this reason, because of this problematic relationship with immediacy, which often translates into constant urgency, into desperation (literally, “a denial of waiting”), into a malevolent association between immediacy and efficiency, it seems important to begin to impose a deliberate digital-human wait-time. When it is the machine that generates it, desperation occurs, although technical failure is also the best and most-used excuse to justify the need to wait.

About the Asynchronous Glossary (A Deliberated Unfinished Objective)

The ultimate goal of the ASYNCHRONOUS GLOSSARY is to reserve a specific time for artistic and theoretical exploration of the possibility of adopting simultaneity as a temporal form associated with anarchy, one that is transversal, based on mutual support, and antagonistic to achievement, as opposed to priorities, to the hegemonic and, essentially, because it allows space for diversity.

It is presented as a vocationally open process. It should be clear that it is not intended to be an anti-technological manifesto but rather a critique of certain forms of technological imposition that threaten our body, our life, us.

We propose to proclaim asynchrony, arrhythmia and unpunctuality as forms of resistance that are less globalizing, more subjective rhythms, the result of an awareness of multi-temporalities and their integration.

[Featured Image: SpaceX space rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA. Photo by Arnau Rovira Vidal].