Michael Agzarian, Kari Piippo and Alan Rowlands
'Know Time'
2008
What is time?
If no one asks me, I know; if I seek to explain it, I do not
St Augustine.
This simple pithy statement summarizes the human experience. The human concept of time, visible throughout human societies from the ancients to the complexity of modern society, is so omnipresent and knowable and yet defies easy explanation. Coordinating and recording activity requires systems, temporal structures, to relate events to the regularities of the Universe.
The temporal structure is an intrinsic part of the reality of everyday life. Each day demands that we synchronise what we want to do around the time that we have available. The temporal categories of the day, week, month, and year are all temporal structures for our projects. The time-order of everything we do appears an inherent part of the natural environment: Yet, it is a structure we are socialised into, internalise and accept as a fundamental reality.
Know Time
Synchronizing work with the time I know I have available doesn’t always work for me so I collaborated with a couple of people to whom the opposite was the norm. As a result of discussions with Alan (Sydney), Peter (Sweden) and Kari (Finland ) I looked at visual ways to represent our differences and similarities, combining images, text and philosophies into a body of work that encapsulates our different ideas on time and the things we do.
Michael Agzarian
Thesis: The Myths of Time: The individual and social constructions of temporal reality. by Dr Alan Rowlands
Know Time
Agzarian / Piippo / Rowlands
