This lecture performance has come together after revisiting materials from the work “Now is No Time At all” which was made three years before.
The lecture performance also picks up on the part of the work which was never shown in its final realization in 2019, yet it situates it new in the context of Germany and speaks out the essayistic part that was originally thought to be the voice-over and later on was reduced to subtitle hovering 5 channel video. Here you could watch an excerpt from this lecture.
Now Is No Time At All, July 2019
5 screens, speakers, sound loop
Now Is No Time At All is a 5-channel video installation, with each component demonstrating a distinct realization of speed. Paulo Virilio suggests dromology as a question of rhythm, of the variety of rhythms, of chrono-diversity. This unpacks the relationship between the accelerated tempo and its prolonged realization. The beat which arises from the collision is a stimulus, and marks the durational pattern in a percussive sense. High-speed cameras conjure the eyes, but fail to manipulate the ears. A sudden boom becomes silent, or an instantaneous beat expands into something soothing. The periodic indicative element is missing, the crash repeats without damage, the explosion costs no wounds.
Rehearsing the catastrophe fetishizes the properties of the outcome, forgets the causality. It is a devastating attempt to capture the immediacy, to freeze it in order to gaze at it. It is flirting with the monument of the crash, privileges the micro- and milliseconds of destruction. The speed of the accident penetrates the perception of time. It squeezes the possibility of diverse rhythms, it converges all to one, the higher speed.
Now is the time which does not pass. The time in which the past is present more than ever. One cannot enact prevention without a determined future. Yet, one cannot account for the totality of contingencies. Now has no variety of rhythms, now is no time at all.
UNTOUCHABILITY TO UNSPEAKABILITY by Mohit Shelare
Aria Farajnezhad 