<nettime> Warm-time-machine

[Nils Roeller <nils@khm.de>]

Warm-time-machine
The word was coined by the artist Joseph Beuys and it is an answer on
the novel with the title time machine of H.G. Wells. The Cuscokids hope
that the warm-time-machine will lead today to a possible answer, an
answer of artists and researchers on the time machines of dominant media
like CNN and opinion leading newspapers. The time  machine of H.G. Wells
is simply scientific-numeric. It enables  a person to go up and down in
the line of time, for example from 31 december 1899 back to 099 or
forwards to 20.997. The time-machine is simply scientific because it
presumes that there is only one numeric time.

The idea that there is a clear order in time is simply naiv. At the
Festival Videobrasil Luis Valdovino and Dan Boord showed in their film
“Standards” that before 1884 there have been many different local times
in Europe and North-America: A coexistence of different beginnings of
the day. This got cleared by introducing the standard of Greenwich time.
This change was necessitated by the organisation of continental
railroadnetworks. This is an example that technology like trainnetworks
does change our being in the time.

Now we do face how the view of CNN does shape our understanding of the
WTC-Attacks. From the Afghan nation (and their different ethnic peoples)
we do know that they do not have TV’s. They have a different
timestructure and understanding of the events, not because they are
enemies, just because they are informed by different media.

For the Cuscokids it was important that they got informed through the
german radio, that invited the citizens to do something for the
americans. It was a good and wise invitation to use the telephone and
the internet to express solidarity and to simply show our personal
friends that we are with them, that they are still connected. A warm
gesture.

The Cuscokids do believe that every medium can be used to create
warmness. But in order to realize this one needs to see differences
between CNN and a well informing broadcast services, also between the
time of a western movie and the time it takes to read one Thousand and
one night. At the moment we are not only in a time of political change
but also in a time of time-structures.

The fastest networks, the fastest computers do set standards of acting
globally. This has not to be necessarily so. Videobrasil is an example
how artists can change attitudes towards time.
For example the film of  Edgar Endress “La Procession”. The subject of
this 7 minutes 13 seconds long film is a moment that changed his life.
The moment when his father refused to applaude a procession of Pinochet.
History books will not tell this. It is too individual. But modernity
has shown that one day in the life of a man in Dublin can attract on the
long run more spirits than daily affairs reported in the news and in the
history books. Edgar Endress’ film is one of many important examples
about possible warmness.

One of the major impulses of Videoart is its different use of the
electronic medium. Videoart shows that the medium used by CNN can be
used as counter-time-machine, that pays attention to single individual
events.

The Towards Cuzco-Manifesto(www.tuxamoon.de/cuscokids: see also
nettimein september) stops by saying: we want to build step by step the
Cuzco Academy. In the following month we wish to invite international
artists to make works on pieces of pre-Columbian art and science. Second
we want to start a series of debats towards Cuzco.


Content-Description: Visitenkarte für Nils Röller

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