Abstract
An accompanying essay in the cataogue of the eponymous exhibition which took place in Cursor Gallery in Prague in 2017. The words 'I don't have time' embody one of the key features of contemporary subjectivity.
Compared to an era that 'believed in the future', the last few decades have been dominated more by a dystopian imaginary. We no longer look to the future with hope but with fear.
We no longer experience the present as the locus of becoming, where decisions are being forged that lead to change, but as the endless prolongation of a status quo, with which the acceleration of technological changes and the flow of information is in only ostensible contrast. In that our sensibility is collapsing in its attempt to cope with the flood of data and demands, our living time is fracturing into a cluster of discrete fragments subject to commodification.
Is time passing too fast? Or is it simply standing still? What seems clear is that it no longer belongs to us. So how can we regain time? Should we try to slow down the pace of life and save the few remaining achievements of modernity from extinction? Or should be accelerate still further the development of technology and speculatively change the present such that we look at it from the perspective of the future? Or should we find a point of leverage in the present that will allow us once more to understand the future as open?