A couple of terms referring to time-procedures, in current humanities and cultural discourse, are borrowed from electro-engineering and computing science; therefore they are not just philosophical metaphors. They rather indicate an implosion of the former transcendent signifier called "time" into a myriad of differential timing processes; termini technici for events in signal transduction and processing such as "dead time", "delay line", "real time" and "asynchronous communication" precisely replace traditional notions of temporality such as "history" or the "present". As indicated by current avant-garde topics like "the post-contemporary", new cultural techniques of time practices emerge not only on a micro-level but increasingly spread into every-day practices: the techno-logical regime.

Previously emphatically differentiated qualities of linear time which belong to the symbolical order of time (past, present and future) increasingly fold into one, in a compressed, dense present. In that sense, the current contemporary condition is an interlacing of two temporalizing gestures: on the one hand, there is the immediacy of ARCHIVING THE PRESENT in digital data processing, while at the same time the past is immediately relegated and up-dated to the present in online communication: RE-PRESENCING THE ARCHIVE.

The grammar of language allows to express this shift. The past is not "imperfect" any more, but becomes "historical perfect": an enduring past. And future is not simply what is to come, but can be preemptive, the future-in-the-past as futurum exactum. In communication engineering, both temporal forms can be formulated in terms of the chrono-technical time channel, as the two temporal faces of delayed present.

The lecture will try to locate this analysis in precise case studies.

The Lecture is FREE but you need to register  with Maj Bjørn Ørskov at mbo@aros.dk. Please write "Ernst at ARoS" in the subject line and state your name in the message.

Bio-bibliographical note:

Having been academically trained as a historian (PhD) and classicist (Latin philology and Classical Archaeology) with an ongoing interest in cultural tempor(e)alities, Wolfgang Ernst grew into the emergent technology-oriented media studies and is Full Professor for Media Theories in the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2003. His academic focus has been on archival theory and museology, before attending to media-technological matters. His current research covers media archaeology as method, theory of technical storage, technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, and sound analysis ("sonicity") from a media-epistemological point of view.

Books in English: Digital Memory and the Archive (2013); Stirring in the Archives. Order from Disorder (2015); Chronopoetics. The temporal being and operativity of technological media (2016); Sonic Time Machines. Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices and Implicit Sonicity in Terms of Media Knowledge (2016).