Introduction. Rendering (Time)

This special issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality considers the relationship between media, time, and forms of cultural and artistic expression. With the contributions to this issue, we aim to engage closely with an exciting and longstanding research theme that mixes philosophy and media and film studies with work from history, geography, women and gender studies, and the expansive field of environment and ecological studies. The continued interest in the question of time mediations is in large part due to the incredible ways, that our experience of time has been transformed by major meta-phenomena, from electrification and international air travel, to globalization and climate change, by technological innovations that have reorganized our understanding of time in important ways, and by the appreciation that experience is structured by politics, capital, and other hegemonic expressions of power. In this issue, we start from a basic position: All forms of mediated communication can be understood in terms of space and time. With an attention to the temporal components of this relationship, we can think of these things in the banal sense: we rely on numerous media forms to tell us what time it is, and various aspects of our public life are intended to remind us about things like life and death, the beginning and end of things. Innovations such as national broadcasting systems and YouTube make it possible for people to experience events simultaneously (or close to it) across geographical locations. Many devices, from cameras to computers, are able to freeze time, to play it in reverse, or to take images from different time periods and “photoshop” them together. Genres of cultural content, from year-end lists to notions of “prime time,” carve up and recalculate time according to commercial purposes. We frequently talk of life being “speeded up” because of the power of digital technologies, a perception that runs alongside the development of communication technologies in the modern era. Developments such as the recent economic crisis imply a temporal break, a time that implies rethinking and transformation. A discussion about the “newness” of media technologies is itself a discussion about time, about what came before our latest innovations, what may come after, or about how history repeats itself. How we have come to conceive of a variety of developments associated with digital culture is also intimately tied up with ideas about time, whether in terms of 24-hour news channels or “real-time” information. But we can also consider the temporal and environmental dynamics of processes of consumption and commodification; most technological devices are built to be obsolete, to be short-term affairs before moving on to the newest thing. What lies behind these different characterizations is the idea that time is rendered both by and through media technologies. From photography to cinema, from video art to memes, we can understand the temporal dimensions of mediated expression. Media represent (or mis-represent) and organize (and dis-organize), they store and disseminate, they facilitate control on the one hand and encourage movement on the other. Through these efforts, media serve a transformative purpose; through acts of representation and manipulation, one can appreciate the forces that structure and dictate the times of our lives. At the same time, audiovisual technologies alter our media practices and our understanding of aesthetic concepts. Moreover, beyond issues of representation, all cultural practices related to temporal media represent an epistemological shift in our conceptualizations of modern values, starting with how we configure time. In this respect, the practices explored in this issue fontépoque, they form specific configurations of media which, as apparatuses, structure events in such a way as to alter both our cognitive processes …