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Gather
“Buth-buth-buth-buth-buth-buth,” went Asten, softly, passing behind the half circle of adults at the driftwood fire on the wide, twilit beach. Rig followed, also going, “Buth-buth-buth-buth,” but louder. They were being spaceships, to judge from their maneuvers around a dune and their communications—“Locked in orbit, Navigator!”—But the noise they were imitating was the noise of the little fishing boats of Liden putt-putting out to sea. ——Ursula K. Le Guin, The Shobies’ Story, (1990)
Time Travel
Why?
It’s a way out of crisis: to leave the here and now. Imagining ourselves out of the current situation, to envision change. Maybe even to manifest it. Whole bodies of art and literature are devoted to this idea of speculation——that reimagining our future through cultural forms can be empowering and impactful, especially for those who are frequently erased from written histories and left out of visions of the future.
Transilience is to pass abruptly from one thing to another. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about it as is the transfer of a body from one point in space-time to another, without interval,” like an instant wormhole. A sudden transition.
She also wrote that “to those who live in time, sequency is the norm, the only model.”
This workshop is a space for us to consider other models. To share and see how we might do this together, with this in mind: leaving our here and now. The potential to gain open access to both internal and external forces for sudden, collective change, stretching our sense of what’s possible through creative acts.
Seeing otherwise.
Time travel is easy.
All you have to do is look up at the sky, at the light shining right to your eyes, across billions of light years. It’s light from the deep past. We experience it now, in our present. We are right here in its future. The entire night sky is our past, headed towards us.
So who has done it? Do any of you have any experience with time travel, directly or indirectly?
Time zones
In a way, we’re all playing with time right now. We’re all in different zones. What are our time zones?
We think of them as strips, a rational abstraction that connects us across geography. A way to reconcile our relationship to the sun, as individual points on a sphere, each point perceiving the light source differently. The time zones smooth out those differences, and apply a rational consistency to our days, allowing us to perceive and communicate effectively. Linear time, across neat segments, from point A to point B.
But our various geographic locations and unique relationships to gravity mean that we’re all experiencing time slightly differently, here on this zoom. Zoom flattens time, and brings us together into a single space-time. Internet time. Perhaps the screen is its own time zone. The screen is another way to smooth out our differences in time. A way to share a common time.
I wonder if our different time zones might look more like this. Stretchy, connected, different shapes, different ways to connect and perceive time, not just in a linear way around a sphere. I wonder if we looked for these shapes, if we could find them, here on this call.
Mind, body
I’ve tried to time travel, as a mind-body experiment, as a way to trick my body into feeling that it isn’t where or when it is. It’s hard. I was only able to do it for a few seconds. But I believe if you practice, the mind-body connection can get fooled, rewired, to believe it’s somewhere else. I’d like to think that it’s not just a sensation, but perhaps real. How do we know for sure?
I’ve only traveled back in time. There’s a way to convince my body that what I hear and feel is actually mapped back onto the memory space of my childhood room when I was 12 or 13. It happens sometimes when I’m looking at an old object, or in an old space. Future travel is much harder.
Queer futurity
In terms of the future, I’d like to evoke the late José Esteban Muñoz and how he connects time in relation to queerness in Cruising Utopia (2009). He writes that queerness is not quite here; it is a potentiality. The thing-that-is-not-yet-imagined. He wrote that we are not quite queer yet, that queerness does not yet exist.
It’s something that we’re constantly becoming, that’s always not yet here.
“Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life.”
“What I am suggesting is that we gain a greater conceptual and theoretical leverage if we see queerness as something that is not yet here,” and to consider an invitation to look to horizons of being. “Indeed to access queer visuality we may need to squint, to strain our vision and force it to see otherwise, beyond the limited vista of the here and now.”
“This impulse is to be glimpsed as something that is extra to the everyday transaction of heteronormative capitalism.”
Something extra.
“An excess, a type of affective excess that presents the enabling of a forward-dawning futurity that is queerness.”
To see otherwise.
So let’s try this———to interrupt the here and now. Let’s step out of linear time.
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Warm up [about 3 minutes]
Queer.Archive.Work
Providence, RI
queer.archive.work@gmail.com