Is Time That Hard to Grasp? - Trailer for the stream Approaching Time-Things

The stream “Approaching Time-Things”, which participates at STREAMS 2021, is dedicated to time that matters, times that take material form, that you can touch; an inquiry into time as an observable phenomenon. In other words, we want to challenge the truism that time is impossible to grasp or represent. Kicking off a trailer in July, the organizers will host a virtual conversation with the philosopher Michelle Bastian, who has spent more than a decade blazing new trails in critical time studies and more-than-human temporalities. In Bastian’s thought, time appears in surprising places. Time-keeping, she has argued, may be more ethical with reference to the fate of leatherback turtles on a warming planet, than in the contemporary, international time regime measuring seconds through shifts in the cesium atom. Currently working on the temporal lessons of phenology – “nature’s calendar,” or the study of recurring nonhuman events and their interactions with climate – Bastian is adamant that time is not intangible at all. Is time that hard to grasp? Tune in on August 5th, 14.00–15.00 CET as we reflect on this critical issue. We will also be considering why time has been so abstracted throughout modern Western history, and what role this abstraction plays in the grand temporal imaginaries of modernity. Finally, what kind of colonial notions of seasonality makes some Australians of European descent sport fake Christmas spruces in mid-summer?