|
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. Henri David Thoreau Time Design
by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
My father was a very special person.
He was born in Luso, a village near Coimbra, in Portugal – and his birth coincided with the end of the First World War.
From a very young age he revealed a great talent, especially for micro-mechanics. Very attentive to that exuberant talent, in 1936 his father started a clock-making industry in Brazil, which a view to orienting and giving shape to that energy. At the time, my father was only seventeen years old.
After many years of development, the industry grew and became the second largest in the world during the 1970s.
But for my father there was something more profound, a strong mark in his soul, a love that magnetized him throughout his life: time.
What is the nature of time?
What is this mysterious thing that, like an arrow, seems to be oriented inexorably forward?
Since I was a boy I listened his ravishing explanations of Minkowski, Einstein, imaginary intergalactic travels, time dilating or contracting, black holes, pulsars and minerals vibrating in their piezoelectric traces, the strange behaviors of gases, that seemed to me like the construction of an amazing world of science fiction.
All fiction is part of reality and all reality is a kind of fiction.
We shared this love – beyond architecture, music, photography, poetry and cinema lay the fascination for time.
Music is time, and when I was very young, we both used to lie down on the floor with our eyes closed, to listen to Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov or Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Toscanini among so many others.
In painting he was amazed by Hieronymus Bosch, Magritte, Max Ernest or Dali.
Surrealism meant for him, in many senses, liberation from time. For him, Bosch was the first surrealist.
He became a specialist, an inventor of machines with which to measure what he aspired to be freed from.
He loved Picasso and his synthetic cubism that fixed the totality of being in a single moment of time.
I believe that in this regard I was the only person with whom he shared this magical universe.
He was never, in fact, an artist or even a scientist in the most precise senses of these terms. He was a true engineer, someone devote to the engine, to machines, to the practical application of laws, sometimes even too pragmatic.
He was an inventor, like Edison.
He registered more than two hundred patents.
A solitary inventor, passionate about the mysteries of Nature.
However, although turned toward the future, given his amazement at science and discovery – surely a part of the search for an essential foundation to such a spirit – he was also inclined to dive into the past.
Since his young years he had been trying to understand the enigmas of the Ancient Egypt, the magical spirit of Thales, and the thought of Pythagoras.
Among the most ancient thinkers, Archimedes was the one he loved more intensely.
The other was Galileo – to my father, Galileo emerged as a landmark indicating a profound change in Western thought.
He told me, when I was a child, without concealing a timid and elusive emotion, about the old Galileo, blind and confined to a cell, within stone walls, explaining to his pupils the secrets of the pendulum he had discovered when he was only nineteen years old.
And I asked how, being blind, the master was able to explain a drawing? - Only geniuses are able to do that, to transmit things in so mysterious way – he replied.
I imagined that scene.
Everything always turning around time.
In 1950, when he was about thirty years old, my father decided to start a collection of old clocks and watches.
He never looked for the most valuable in material terms.
He was not a collector of material wealth, a merchant of old art or precious stones.
He was a researcher, like a criminal detective, joining hundreds of pieces to form a huge non-verbal library, always at his disposal, like a gigantic bricolage made with other times, with other thoughts, other people with whom he could be together.
His curiosity, his real interest was always oriented toward technical development.
This, because the idea of technology means “to make” and action inevitably implies a reflection about reality.
He wanted to understand through technique, through action, through reflection on natural phenomena, the secrets of time and of Humanity.
With such a brilliant spirit, he traveled the world and formed a formidable collection of clocks and watches.
Not matter where he went, after 1956 my mother was always at his side, helping him with the pieces he identified, like a true archaeologist.
For about forty years, they never separated from each other, not even for a single day.
Time was, to him, so fascinating as well as terribly scarce, fast and ephemeral.
In 1996, he died – succumbing to a generalized infection.
Unfortunately and inevitably, his collection – then consisting of some hundreds of pieces – was distributed among his four children.
The choice of the pieces was made by each one of the sons in a process of continuous alternation – each one choosing a piece at each time.
I had been the one responsible for the collection for some years in the past, and I knew each one of those pieces very well.
In the beginning of the 1980s I even wrote a small book – a Brief History of the Design of Time.
Nevertheless, facing the distribution of the pieces, I started to re-learn, with the utmost dedication, the entire history of clock and watch design.
My life took a very different path from that of my father.
Since I was a boy, even loving science my soul was profoundly permeated by art, architecture and music.
I studied with some fabulous masters, people linked to names like Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier. I had as a great master and friend Hans Joachim Koellreutter who was pupil of Paul Hindemith, of Hermann Scherchen and of Marcel Moyse. I studied the Theory of Thought, more precisely Semiotics. I became an architect, urban planner and composer of what we might call contemporary erudite music, or experimental music, or New Music. And also a photographer. I chose the transverse flute as my first instrument. I wrote various books and launched several compact discs. John Cage invited me to collaborate with him and with Merce Cunningham. We became great friends. The same happened with René Berger.
That is to say, my life was on a different scale, in a world very different from the one that designed my father’s life.
But, even after his disappearance, a spiritual link remained between us – something that transcends our personal choices and paths, a thing perennially present in our genetic code and that, at this moment, is revealed in the fascination for discovery, for mystery, wherever it may be.
Thus, when he died, my choice of the pieces couldn’t aspire to anything less than a true artwork – using the expression with the greatest possible freedom.
Choosing should be an act that constitutes a criticism of his first trace, an act of deconstruction that could be truly enlightening.
Only in this way, constituting two free and independent operations – in all senses – would it be possible for something really interesting to emerge.
Aware of such an ethical and aesthetic responsibility I once again dived again into the books for weeks, and remembered many things he had personally taught me over the years.
The collection was eventually divided up.
But what might have represented a bitter sensation in face of the dismembering of the original collection, ultimately proved to be as a magical act of creativity.
It was as if from that great number of pieces something new, something with a very special design, had emerged.
I put together a new collection, in homage to my parents, with pieces dated from the 17th century but also with new exemplars I have found and collected in my constant travels.
Time
Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. Marcus Tullius Cicero
The question of time has been a central element designing the basis of all philosophical thought in any society, in any epoch.
This affirmation appears risky, but it is interesting to orient our reflections toward it.
The appearance of funeral ritual is connected with this question, what is linked to the origin of language: the fixation of memory.
Jacques Lacan argued that «the critical point from which we date in the human being the speaking being is the grave, that is to say, the place from which a species is affirmed in which, contrarily to any other, the dead body takes into itself what had granted character to the living, namely the body».
Such an identity of the body is only possible with time.
At his birth, Hades, god of the death in ancient Greece, is devoured but also expelled by Chronos. Death, disappearance, but also discovery, the origin of knowledge and of memory: these are devoured, but equally restored, replaced by time.
We only know ourselves in limit moments, when something disappears, when a thing collapses, when there is a kind of death, of transformation – any type of metamorphosis, on any scale.
Thus, Hades is also in a certain sense a god of knowledge.
The word death in Romance languages – mort in French, morte in Portuguese, Italian or Spanish – derives from a prehistoric term *mer which passed to the Latin mor. Curiously, that ancient Indo-European term *mer would be, through mysterious paths, associated in its origin with the likewise Indo-European expressions *me and *ma, that generated the words matter and sea in Romance languages, as well as machine, projecting the idea of measure and leading to the Sanskrit manu, that means sage and who measures.
Moreover, *ma is associated with the idea of a creative energy – from where the word mother emerges.
All measure implies a differential element.
All knowledge implies a difference.
Chronos is son of the sky and the Earth, of Uranus and Gaia. He is son of the movement of the stars and our planetary travel in the sidereal space.
Hence, what it is vulgarly known as time is established – the principle of orderly movement, oriented by the stars, the Sun and the Earth.
The word time would launch some of its most remote references to the prehistoric world through the Indo-European root *tem meaning to cut, to divide, which even generated the word temple.
That ancient prehistoric term produced the Greek verb temnein that means to cut. From there we have the appearance of the expression atom, that literally means what is impossible to cut, what cannot be divided.
The etymology of the word temple, in its turn, refers to a separated space – isolation that can be considered as one of the fundamental features of what we call sacred.
The existence of the sacred is founded on free thought, on free time, which is opposite to set formats or stereotypes.
Life itself tends to the stereotype, in light of its most basic traces, if we take as an example the so-called circadian cycles and the daily fluctuations of temperature in our bodies.
In this way, and even if in general we have no consciousness of such evidence, the stereotype is nothing more than the sublimation of Nature in its modus operandi, through the emergence of stable patterns of repetition like what we find in our quotidian rhythm of nourishment and of sleep, or in the geological stratifications, in the regular migratory patterns and even in the cycles produced by the rotation of the Earth.
Sacred is the rupture with stereotype.
Although we do not perceive how it happens, and even taking culture as an instrument against Nature, we end up following to its rhythms – from the point where we made the meaning of tradition emerge that, despite implying in itself a rupture and a transformation, aspires to a continuous rotation, to a perennial repetition.
The anti-format, the movement contrary to the format, in opposition to the stereotype: that is the basis of the sacred condition of free thought, by means of the separation or the distancing from Nature in the generation of culture.
As the content of a new medium is its previous one, the content of culture obeys to cycles and repetition.
What we take as culture, in its broadest sense, is a criticism of Nature that brings in its non-linear traces, in its elements of discovery, of enlightenment, in its very first essence, what we call free time, which is the sacred.
There always is an element of the sacred in everything we call culture.
Because of this, like what happens with what we call culture, the temple is a place separated from everything else.
Thus, in its origins, the word time implies difference – and it is only with the difference that we have consciousness.
In last instance, consciousness is nothing more than the existence of the things – because all existence imposes some type of difference.
This does not mean to say, however, that things are not real.
For the terms real and reality come from the Latin word res, which, in a fascinating way, seems to be associated with the verb reri, which means to think. Because of this, res does not mean only thing but also conjuncture and experience.
What we understand as reality depends on the thought, on the structure of how we think.
Therefore, following Emanuel Kant’s ideas – and, much later, those of Werner Heisenberg – what we know is nothing more than the form of knowing.
Kant said that the «reason alone understands what it produces following its own plans».
Reality is nothing more, in the final analysis, than our mind structure.
This does not mean to say that such a structure is restrict to an individual or that it is imprisoned inside a brain.
If we can only know through difference, and if time implies a system of differences, then reality could only mean a difference on a structure of differences.
Hence, only a totality can mean a reality – deconstructing the old synchronic order by means of an approach that takes everything in a single shot.
Hidden by his mother soon after his birth, and replaced by a stone wrapped in fabric, Zeus is the only son of Chronos who is not devoured by his own father.
The stone is the temporal interconnector par excellence.
Chronos devours a stone by mistake.
Zeus, replaced by a simulacrum that is a temporal interconnector, emerges from time but is hidden from it, in order to not be devoured. The name Zeus comes from the Indo-European *diós – that was the god of the diurnal sky and light, the god of vision.
This is the origin of our Latin word for god – deus.
While the most fundamental nature of time is diachronic, one thing after the other, that of vision is the systasis – everything in a single shot.
When we look at a painting, for example, we don’t see one thing at a time, but rather the whole – this is the systasis. However, when we hear, the sounds follow themselves in a line of discontinuities – and this is diachrony.
That is to say, the word synchrony appeared from the fusion in Greek of syg and kronos, found in the Latin syn chronu, meaning the assemblage, the reunion, or the joined action of time.
This is the essential principle that characterizes the machine and vision.
There is no mechanism or machine without time, which hence reminds us of death – mor in Latin.
But there is also no creative energy – recalling the Indo-European particle *ma, without time.
Can there be an opposite to time?
This was a fundamental question among the ancient Greeks – already visual enough to be able to imagine it. Only if a no-time were possible could time itself have an end. In the contrary case, time would necessarily be eternal.
But if a no-time exists, and is to be placed at the beginning or at the end of time, it should have some concrete existence, what is impossibility, a contradiction.
Since no contrary exists, time itself cannot be some existent thing.
Kant took this as a central question for his reflections. He would still insist, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that however unknowable, it is only in time that «the reality of phenomena is possible».
So, it is only presupposing that we can represent any thing.
That is, time is inherent in everything – what Kant so sagely called a priori.
The Mahabharata – the sacred Indian book – tells us that knowledge is a continuous fabric, but full of multiple points of mutation.
The genius Heinrich Zimmer maintained that India thinks of time as a biological reality, in which individual existence is but an ephemeral thing, lost in a gigantic scale; whereas the West thinks of time as a biographical question, the history of an existence.
And it seems that this was exactly the case, at least until the beginning of the third millennium.
We are educated to regard time as history.
And history nothing more is than a civilizational technology.
We often forget that history implies a beginning, a middle and an end and, furthermore, something that fills the space between these intervals – the verb.
The verb generates, in logical terms, a directionality of the action – this is that – which we call predication.
This is one image of time.
In Zen, Enlightenment, the moment of discovery, is the essential element.
And there can be no consciousness without difference, without enlightenment, without discovery.
Octavio Paz, commenting on the appearance of the ready-made, Roger Cailois and in particular on Marcel Duchamp’s works, said that in the ancient China, long ago, something like works of art were created by religious people when they chose some stones, initially by chance, and then signed their names on them.
«…they chose stones that seemed fascinating and converted them into artworks just painting or writing their names on them», told Paz.
What those ancient thinkers were doing made direct reference to time – what, in a certain sense, is not very different from what Duchamp did.
Creating differential elements, we establish limit moments, we restore Hades from the shadows and, making Chronos expel the god of death, we become conscious of what forms us, in a particular moment, and we discover – Satori!
In ancient Egypt, Osiris was more than the god of the world of the dead and of the resurrection – he implied, in everything we signified, the notion of time.
This is a notion of time formalized by the serpent biting its own tail, in a continuous recurrence, in a structure of self-similarity, like the notion of the fractal universe that Mandelbrot would unveil.
This ancient concept of a serpent biting its own tail, seem in a different dimension by Mandelbrot’s fractals, shows us that the logical structure that characterizes time can also be established in space.
When we take a particular perimeter, of any real figure, and establish its measurements – like the frontiers of a country – if we change the scale, that measurements will be keep getting bigger until it reaches infinity. And we may recall, here, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
The ancient Egyptians, like the Indians today, had clear this notion.
To them, numbers were more about quality than quantity.
Each number thus indicated a cosmic relation: everything present inside a multidimensional continuum.
The number one was the whole, while two was the opposition manifested by everything that exists. Everything that exists brings in itself an opposition – light and dark, cold and hot and so on.
Because of this it is said that Nature works by opposites, in its most diverse implications. The number three was the result of the fusion of the whole and of time, revealing the reason. Four was the dynamic of life: time and its intrinsic contradiction – that was present in the figure of the swastika, as one finds in India. Five was reason and time, that is, wisdom.
Such ideas were not totally new.
They were already present, in one way or another, in Mesopotamia, among the Sumerians and among the Akkadians.
Among the Sumerians, the essential element – apart from the pentagon – that designated real power was the “register of decisions”, also known as the “register of destines”.
The writing designated the people’s fate.
Through writing, especially through pictographic writing but more intensely with the phonetic code, syllabic or alphabetic, the sense of sight becomes the most important faculty.
Everything that had previously been fixed by memory through the sense of hearing, and that gave time a specific form, came gradually to be contaminated by sight, to which the systasis, the sense of totality, is fundamental.
At the point we began to deconstruct a universe characterized by diachronic through the sense of sight.
This Mesopotamian legacy passes on, intensified, to Egypt with the emergence of construction with stones – the temporal inter-connector par excellence.
While the ancient Mesopotamian peoples built predominantly with clay and adobe, in Egypt the use of stone appears.
What is more interesting, the flat stone with precise cuts makes its appearance, forming drawings of light with the projection of sun light, like what we can now do with neon since the 20th century.
The flat stone, the ability to cut on the irregular surface the pyramids as elements detached from the whole, divided into visual compartments, isolated in the desert, with the first pyramid as a staircase ascending to the sky, planetary points that aim to subjugate the death in its various dimensions, represent a conquest on the time.
They overcome of time in the way to total knowledge.
A strange and enigmatic transcendence of the nature of knowledge.
The ancient Egyptian pyramids were crowed with a refined piece of metal, so as to render invisible the meeting point of the vertices on the top.
That point represented the Sun and even the Nature itself – something that exists but that is not intelligible.
Such notion of non-intelligibility passed on to Greece – especially through Pythagoras and Plato – and would contribute significantly to shaping the idea of God in modern times. The untouchable but omniscient God.
Everything was linked to the idea of time. But, is it possible to have an idea of time?
This paradoxical idea of time, a thing represented by the Indo-European particle *tem, indicating a division, was incorporated by Zarathustra: after all, not only can time exist only if it contains elements contradictory to its linear nature, as in the very existence of things, but everything is composed by a conflicting duality, like silence, not to mention the very nature of consciousness.
About four hundred years after Zarathustra, Mani – a sage painter, also known as the Buddha of Light – was born in the Sassanid Empire, near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He would deal with these ideas with a rare refinement.
Mani ended up being tortured and murdered by the aristocracy, and from his name the expression manichaeism would appear – a concept that was contrary to his own ideas!
He maintained that the world is composed of dualities – not obligatorily good or bad – elements that projected a reality in continuous metamorphosis.
When Mani was born, parchment, a slower and less flexible medium, gradually replaced papyrus for writing. Papyrus had provided a more intensive use of sight and of the phonetic alphabet.
Mani, who had a great visual sensitivity, lived in a world that quickly abandoned the Greek and Roman structures of thought, the strong visual structure of Aristotle and the already strongly departmentalized and uniform Roman world.
While for Mani the image of time implied the conception of a universe made of interactive and interdependent compartments, the society of his age understood everything as part of a continuum without divisions.
In logical terms, the eye is characterized by systasis, by the capacity to approach everything at a single time, but projects the sensation of continuum. On the other hand, the ear operates by diachronic punctuated by internal divisions, but projects the sensation of stratification.
This happens because Nature works by opposites.
Thus, democracy is born of a literary culture, giving the idea of personal independence, while the tribal cultures have a strong sensation of interpersonal connectedness.
Saint Augustine, who during ten years followed Mani’s thoughts, would later question, in his Confessions: «What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there will be no present time. But, then, how is it that there are two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet? But if the present were always be present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time, but eternity».
Augustine’s time is a continuous time, more strongly acoustical, realized in the present – the aspiration to eternity.
But, in the 11th century the production of paper begun in the West – starting in Spain – and, gradually the new flexible informational accumulator and articulator generated a time compartmentalized into uniform unities.
Soon church towers began to mark time in the ancient villages and cities, the roads and streets were paved, traffic became more fluid, numbers lost their dimension of quality and came to be regarded instead as expressions of quantity, everything was seen more and more in terms of form and content and, thus, the social structure underwent a new mutation.
At this point we became more attached to a uniform and stereotyped notion of time.
However, on the other side of the planet, both in Japan and in China, time was measured through sticks of incense, with fragrances changing depending on the day or the season.
The olfactory sense is our most integral faculty.
While in the Middle Ages the world was made of parallel and relatively independent moments of time – the appearance of the mechanical clock and of Gutenberg’s movable metallic type press led to a standardization and a sense of unification that would touch virtually the whole planet only in the 20th century.
Step by step, the standardization and normalization of time finished redrawing the rhythms established by the stars, by the Sun and by the movement of the Earth.
The visual world stereotypes and desecrates.
The perception of time is directly linked to our memory.
Basically, we have two types of memory: short term and long term.
However, memory is not a passive thing, but rather a permanent construction, a continuous creative elaboration.
Moreover, memory is not something restricted to our bodies or our brains.
Over thousands of years we have constructed various true prosthesis for memory, such as paper.
A piece of paper is not only a medium for passively storing information.
All information is a dynamic metabolism.
By changing our cognitive prosthesis – like the paper or the computer – we change the relationship between long and short-term neuronal systems.
Changing these relations, implying, of course, a different creative approach to the informational systems, we change our comprehension of time.
On a piece of paper, whether blank and awaiting our intervention or being already printed, as in the case of a book, everything is permanent creativity.
Naturally, such creativity takes different forms.
The Gutenberg movable type press started a process of intensification of what we might call one-way communication.
Basically, the printing revolution saw the fusion of the paper and the phonetic alphabet through a method of high definition and low internal mobility. Centuries later, computers in a network constitute, for example, systems in high definition and high internal mobility.
Without forgetting its creative potentiality, the process established by Gutenberg gave rise to media characterized by strong systemic stability – such as the modern book, as an example – and low interactive dynamic. That gives us the impression of being in a passive attitude when we read in silence.
This is the image of what we know as the classical music concert, of the Italian stage, of the newspaper, the transmitter and the receptor.
This is the image of the book.
All sensorial extension or prosthesis is nothing more is than a radical part of the environment, that transforms its essence. And for this reason, it is strongly numbing.
Absorbed in this environment, we design our schools – where a relatively static organism of teachers, disciplines, and timetables is placed over against the students, as one side directed to the other.
In the family, parents are generally in one side and the children in the other.
Religious rites – not matter what creed – have an emitter and an audience… and so on.
We can take these images as relatively precise, but they are the foundation of much of what we know.
This also is the image of time which we created.
An inexorable time, implacable, external to us individuals.
A thing about what we can do nothing.
But this is not obligatorily a universal idea.
During the 1970s a vigorous discussion about the nature of time appeared.
A little earlier, brilliant scientists like John Archibald Wheeler argued, in light of the quantum theories, that time has a symmetric nature.
Past and future would coincide, in some way.
But Ilya Prigogine would question these ideas with a solid argumentation: based on the concept of dissipative systems.
Everything, seems from the perspective of thermodynamics, is characterized by a strongly dissipative nature: transformation.
This idea, that everything is transformation and is continuously dissipating energy, led Prigogine to conclude that time would necessarily obey to only one sense of development.
Thus, the absolute condition of continuous transformation would lead to an equally absolute notion of time, recalling Parmenides when he maintained that «one can not know what is not; and even to express what is not with words is an impossible task. Because to think and to be is the same».
A Cartesian cogito unveiled almost two thousand years before Descartes, in a completely different environment.
The notion of transformation and continuous flux, typical of Heraclitus’ thought, generated the idea of an inexorable, directional time such as we find in Parmenides.
Curiously, the researchers of the quantum universe, arguing for a time with a symmetrical nature, would always be associated with Heraclitus.
Given that everything is in a state of transformation and dissipation, everything would inevitably tend toward entropy.
But, in certain cases, dissipative processes produce new complex models.
It is enough to look at the sky or the stars.
This would thus be a break in the internal symmetry of Nature’s functioning, for otherwise life would not be possible.
However, any dissipative phenomenon implies a moment posterior to the dissipation, that is to say, an arrow in time, a fixed temporal orientation.
If a temporal orientation exists, past and future will be different and therefore time will be asymmetrical.
René Thom and his fabulous Catastrophe Theory brilliantly supported the thesis by Prigogine – quickly classified by some as Aristotelian and deterministic.
«Time remains, in despite of everything, as some fundamentally irreversible thing. When the physicians affirm that all physical processes are reversible, they express what the English call wishful thinking, a strong wish; they eliminate from the phenomenon all the aspects that exhibit certain irreversibility to keep, only, what is perfectly reversible. But, I think that there is no phenomenology without any form of irreversibility, and therefore, to have a phenomenon it is necessary that some thing enter through our eyes» – argued René Thom.
The questions as to whether time is symmetrical or asymmetrical, the reversibility or irreversibility of time, were animated by Hermann Minkowski, later Einstein’s teacher, back in the 19th century.
His ideas about space-time were worldwide famous after his speech, in a conference in 1908, about the notion that «from henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest shadows and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right».
Since space and time components of the same system, temporal reversibility appeared as a reality.
But this question of reversibility of time was already part of Newton’s mechanics, and was known as time reversal invariance. It was about a principle according to which for any movement that occurs or that can occur, the reverse movement is equally possible.
This was an affirmation that that the adepts of the dissipative models simply could not accept: a thing beyond our senses.
John Wheeler would give a reply to Prigogine: everything is a question of scale.
Our idea of directional time is founded in Aristotle, for whom all reality has a causal nature.
But, not only this, everything pertains to a local causality.
Aristotle lived in an epoch designed by an increasing use of papyrus and an already considerable visual intensification.
Predication and the illusion of contiguity, which would lose their importance during the medieval period and would definitively be intensified during the Renaissance, were already well established in the ancient Greek world of Aristotle, and made possible the appearance of the principle of the excluded third. That is, when something is, its opposite simply cannot exist.
This is exactly what the partisans of the dissipative systems defend and hence for this reason they have been classified as Aristotelian.
Such a principle may seem evident to us, but Schopenhauer lively questioned it.
Why should causality be exclusively local?
Like Schopenhauer, John Wheeler did not hide his perplexity – «There are still-stranger features of time that continue to intrigue me. One of these is the asymmetry of time. Another is the quantum fluctuation of time. Beyond those two is the strangest feature of all, the end of time. We can go left and right, or forward and backward, or up and down, all with equal ease. Nothing in the laws of Nature or in experience tells us that we are limited to moving through space in only one direction. Why does time have an arrow? Why do we remember the past but not the future?».
Already in the beginning of the 1970s, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge noticed that the evolution of the living beings, when looked at over a large scale, revealed certain points of mutation that they called punctuated equilibria, which did not obey to any apparent causality.
Schopenhauer’s ideas lead Jung to elaborate the concept of synchronicity, giving space for all kinds of speculation. Based on that, Arthur Koestler would have an immense editorial success with his book The Reasons of Coincidence, which received strong criticism from Peter Medawar.
In 1970 three scientists – Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Nielsen and Leonard Susskind – demonstrated that nuclear interactions could be clearly understood after a model in which the elementary particles would be extremely small, vibrating and one-dimensional.
This model turned possible the conception of the Superstring Theory, an attempt to reach a unified theory of the Universe.
Imagine the atoms, composed of electrons, protons and neutrons. These, in turn, are composed of sub-atomic particles, such as the quarks, the muons or the neutrinos, what would be, however, the components of these smaller particles?
According to the Superstrings model, they would be elementary particles, vibrating and omnidimensional – like strings, if we use the expression somewhat freely.
But, being omnidimensional, they would be out of the space-time as we know it.
That is, they would be in another scale – to recall John Wheeler’s reply to the question about the symmetrical time.
Such a phenomenon would indicate that, however we are all interlinked in a type of temporal network that is symmetrical, with an extremely strong directional nature, beyond a certain scale space-time would work differently.
This reminds us Heraclitus when he said that «just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not».
The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it. Marcus Aurelius
The building
As soon as we approach the site destined for the building of the Time Design Museum in Trancoso, we quickly notice that its topographical shape reveals a slight declivity insinuating a subtle lateral slope.
If we could emit particles heavier than air, from the highest point, particles freely running across the site, they would trace lines in that direction.
But, if we could take the closest buildings as gravitational points, attracting those particles, they would pass to draw curves.
It is a building intended to house a project for a permanent reflection on time – but also images, documentation, musical recordings, space for concerts and small musical ensembles, as well as for other exhibitions and events.
A dynamic space with time as its essential reference.
The flux of people should be dynamic, always bringing a surprise, a discovery.
The determination of the point for launching the flux of people followed certain principles – the proximity to the main avenue, the old building, part of the renaissance convent that will work as a primary entrance, the highest point of the site and the location facing the movement of the Sun.
Following the millennial wisdom of Feng Shui, we can design an interesting diagram for the location of the building.
Through it a kind of cosmic mirror is created.
One of the objectives was to create a building practically isolated from the world, as another world. However, to be a place destined to receive anyone as his or her own space.
An element of discontinuity, of surprise, facing the city.
Thus, the entrance to the main building will have just one door, and the first floor of the building has no windows.
Between the old building of primary access, belonging to the ancient convent, and the building of the museum, a gray space appears – a moment of opening, of transition between the exterior reality and the logic of the newly built structure.
Now, we must dedicate some brief reflections to the nature of what we call time.
At least in what way it directly touches our personal lives – is time a continuous line?
Our temporal perception depends on our memories, short and long term.
If we try to fix our attention on a specific object – our wristwatch, for example – we will easily see how we are unable to maintain our concentration for many seconds.
When we least expect it, our thoughts wander and we are obliged to re-start the experience.
The reason is that we arrived at the limit of our short-term memory.
To simplify, our short-term memory system works as somewhat like continuous cyclical generators, in different frequencies. When a specific cycle of re-entries, as Gerald Edelman called them, reaches certain saturation, that pattern passes to the long-term memory.
Because of this, depending on what we are doing, we have the sensation of larger or shorter time.
The sensation of time depends on the relationship between the discontinuities and the level of redundancy in our actions.
However, this is not the image of a straight line!
We deal with cycles.
But, not with regular cycles.
There remains the question of the discontinuities in a continuous system.
This led me to think about the idea of spirals.
After all, it doesn’t seem that we can imagine time as a straight line or even as a circle.
If we take the closest buildings as gravitational centers and consider some weight in the particles freed from the top of the terrain, the figure resulting from that trajectory would probably be similar to a spiral.
We know some types of spiral.
Theodorus of Cyrene – present at Plato’s Theaetetus – left us a spiral. Archimedes did as well – and he would make his drawing into a practical instrument known as the spiral separator.
We have the spiral founded on Fibonacci’s series of numbers, which inspired much of Le Corbusier’s works, with his modulor.
There also is – underlying all this magical history – the logarithmic spiral by Jacob Bernoulli, which he called the spira mirabilis in 1692.
The history of the spiral is associated with the irrational number that was considered, by the ancient Greeks, as a supernatural number.
In all these spirals, were the cycle is clearly present, the generation of the figure is based on algorithmic systems.
But the reason between the parts is always stable.
However, in our sensation of time we don’t have such stability.
Thus, I wanted to create a spiral where the design would be established by a non-predictable process, where the relations between the parts would, even if oriented in a specific direction, be characterized by non-linear principles.
The spiral appeared as a kind of mathematical attractor.
Something like a gravitational momentum.
The shape of the building should emerge – as it happens to any form – as the crossing of two attractors.
Then I looked to work with two non-linear spirals, with fluctuations in three vectors and not only in two.
The crossing of these spirals, one tending to verticality and the other to horizontality, generated the shape of the building – that is the shape of the terrain and of the flux of people in its turn also recalling something of our sensation of time.
An organic shape that emerges from all potentialities.
Thus, the generation of the design of the building comes from the dynamic metabolism of the flux of people, the local topography and some idea of time.
We have two floors.
The exterior structure is all made in concrete – just as with the image of some contiguous buildings, in gray – but with a shape that always a surprise in all its moments.
Oscar Niemeyer invented the true curve in architecture.
The baroque curve, for example, has only one fundamental point in the compass’ sharp point.
The true curve, in architecture, expands all its fundamental points to an unpredictable set of singularities.
The entrance door structure is made with stone, rough and straight, inlaid, violating the plastic surface – because only the difference generates consciousness. And the doors are layers of brushed metal.
When we enter the building the pavement is covered by a sound absorbent rubber element, and the internal walls are in black.
Subtle holes in the walls of the building permit the passage of narrow solar light beams, redrawing the internal luminous space in a different way at each hour of the day, on each day of the year.
All of this constitutes a gigantic solar clock, a kind of cosmic kaleidoscope designed by light.
Transparent tubes made of acrylic, like ephemeral columns, follow an aperiodic distribution, with the images inside and spot lighting, shining in the midst of the twilight.
Spread out throughout the space, also following a nonlinear, aperiodic order, semi-transparent plastic layers have projected images from spaces of different eras – from the 17th century until now.
In each sector of the large room, we can listen to music of a different period, which disappears as soon as we move to another area.
Together at the entrance door, a small set of computers permit the visitor to make true virtual trips to observe each image in minute detail and to access to its most detailed description.
In the large room with the transparent columns, the images and the music, there is an open space, like a kind of gravitational immaterial center of the building – a place for concerts of small music ensembles, to presentations, debates and reflections.
While the first floor is destined for the exhibition and various activities – and it is a closed nucleus – the ground floor is totally opened. It houses the collection of recorded music, a room for listening, a room for the repair and restoration of old clocks and watches as well as a small deposit.
The upper floor is isolated from the world, dark, while the lower floor is open, full of light and transparency.
The link between the two floors is a fundamental element in the building.
It is a third spiral forming a large staircase; in fact, it is the crossing of two other spirals, forming only one in contrast to the great spirals that generate the structure of the building.
The steps of the large staircase – in metal but covered with a rubber material – are aperiodic in their design, in planimetric terms; large plans that bring the people to observe attentively their own walking.
Supporting the stairs is an irregular wall, a kind of vertical tunnel linking both floors.
On the walls of this tunnel there are the printed the hands of the Trancoso residents, the city where the building was designed for – as a powerful human manifesto, the presence of the population.
The memory of a historical moment.
The ground floor has a great layer of glass, like a huge inclined window; between this layer and the interior space there is a garden, with the most varied species of plants, since they too are part of our lives.
The presence of the plants, constituting almost a glasshouse, absorbs the sound and protects the interior from the direct rays of the sun.
A system of air circulation has been designed for the whole building, from the first to the second floor, in order to reach some balanced temperature and to reduce the thermal amplitude both in the winter and in the summer.
It is a simple building. Traces in the air, designed by the crossing of attractors, of non-linear spirals, generating a kind of rupture at the cognitive level, translated by the surprise, the permanent discovery and the logic that makes us conscious, step by step, at each moment, of our human dimension.
The Time Design Museum, in Trancoso, Portugal is a project created by the Architect Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta http://www.emanuelpimenta.net
|
