To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
--The Byrds, 1965
The concept of time perplexed 4th Century theologian/philosopher Augustine of Hippo: “What, then, is time?” he wrote. “If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” For millennia, from ancient peoples, to 60s rock bands, to modern astronomers, time has been explored and theorized. Today, time is the most used noun in the English and Spanish languages, and time-related words are among the most ubiquitous terms in German, Swahili, Hindi, Russian, Korean, and likely multiple other languages. Time encompasses us like an embrace; yet it also eludes us, is a mystery, even “an illusion,” says Albert Einstein. Is time eternal? Is it linear with a beginning and end? Is it circular, as the seasons seem to suggest? Is it all three of these realities, or more, at once? To explore time is without question a polymathic pursuit. What might the investigation of time, within different frameworks and its multiple realities mean for us? How might understanding time in all its dimensions impact how we see ourselves, and each other? Time will tell.
Alice asked, “What is the matter? Have you pricked your finger?”
“I haven’t pricked it yet,” the Queen said, “but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The late Stephen Hawking said, “nothing cannot exist forever.” One...
In our opening session, TIME served as the framework to understand the universe. TIME though, as Professor of Anthropology Janet Hoskins has shown in her research, can also serve as a paradigm to illuminate human cultures here on earth. In her work with the Kodi, an indigenous people who live...
Physicists say that it is theoretically possible to time travel into the future, but not into the past. Imagine, though, interactive live art that could function like a time-machine and challenge this...
Will there always be, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “a time for peace and a time for
war?”
Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare, as an ongoing and
necessary expression of the state, originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates...
