Abstract
The year 2000 displays a completely different idea of what we think about territory. Territory as a pure geopolitical space is gone. Territory is a much broader concept. Our intellectual concepts, our books, our works and, last but not least, all our archives are the new territories. Giving, contributing concepts, is, therefore, a gesture of expanding and broadening the concept of territory itself.
Territory is to be understand in connection with the capital machine, that means it is inherently connected with two most important processes of political economy and of functioning of capital: territorialization and de-territorialization (cf. Hardt and Negri: Empire). In the first period of capitalism (if we think of the Fredric Jameson conceptualization) the question of territory was connected to the material, geographical aspect, bound to colonial ventures. Today the surplus value can be produced also in such dematerialized territory as it is the Internet. Cyber space is territory in which money is invested and where marketing is connected to stock exchange. This is why, instead of talking about the production of space, that was connected with the modernistic venture and the colonial mind, we have to talk about production of time in relation to territory and space. The space is having a new dematerialized form and is all bound to time. The access to such a dematerialized perception of space (u-topia, non-space) is inherently connected with a question of time (for example with the speed of modems connection); the real time adventure today is about how to convert different time zones in an unified time zone, that will not depend any more of an individual time.
The production of time, as I termed this new mode of production in 1998 (effective in theory, body and mind) is therefore substituting the older modernistic production of space (according to Henry Lefebvre, who wrote a book with such a title in 1910). The production of time is a process that involves the temporization of time (termed by R. Beardsworth); means that time is not something natural, but completely an artificial process; similarly as happened to the paradigm of space in the past: Lefebvre was talking about production of space! The temporization of time denote that time is not any more natural dimension, in synchronicity with our psychological feeling of time. Time is produced and speeded up and new categories of time emerged, also in relation to history and political activism and cyber action. I can quickly summarized this process in relation to History via Virillio as long, short and immediate history, that radically changed the perception of information.
Time is constantly subjected to processes of change, production and modification. Internet as a purely dematerialized unite is perceived as a new space, inherently crucial for the production and dissemination of the surplus value of capital. Internet is a vitally connected to the capital machine. It is controlled, censorship, economically invested, and its borders are regulated. All became perfectly clear after the September 11, 2001. The servers of Internet, of what was perceived as a space of absolute freedom, were shut down for a week, the stock exchange lost a visible percentage of investment and the Internet police intensified the control and monitoring of Internet.
The process of temporization of time, of the production of time changes with the technical support. How? One of the main point of how is to perceive time in relation to space is to erase the difference between the mediatization of time and the so called psychological feeling of time. They are becoming more and more one. Each technology, and the last in the raw is Tele-presence (accessing real spaces through Internet via Internet directed Tele-robotics) is re-used to shorten this difference between time scales. This is why it is possible to say that we can detect a process of a constant tension between the nature of the technical tools that allows the mediation of time and the human experience of time. This tension can be most immediately seen with the digitalization of memory support-systems and the digitalization of archives: our experience of time is being rapidly foreshortened, creating the tension between the international nature of the electronic techniques and the corporal realities that make up much of human life. It is also clear that future technical intervention on the genetic "ingredients" of what is perceived as human will accelerate processes of evolution at such a speed (if this will remain the right term, according to Beardsworth) that present conceptions of history, inheritance, memory and the body will need to be dramatically reorganized, if the definition of what is "human," and what "is not," is not to become the monopolistic game between technosciences and capital (Beardsworth in 1996). The prevention of such situation is only possible trough processes that grasp as much as possible accurate the radically artificial condition of production of time and space, and the aspects of technology that are inherent to such productions. Important here is to understand that without technical devices today we can not re-capture the experience of time: the dimension of remembering and anticipating. Without memory support techniques from photography to a DVD or CD-ROM or Internet (archives) the experience of the past will also not be possible. Temporization of time articulate precisely that our lifetime is a process deeply rooted in technological prosthesis.
The following projects radically discusses the change of time as a politics of time, technology and the subversion of space that I termed as u-utopia of space: IRWIN, Ljubljana, project Privatization of Time Dragan Zivadinov/ Noordung Cosmokinetic Cabinet Theater, Ljubljana, Slovenia performance in zero gravity Noordung Biomechanics Emil Hrvatin, Ljubljana, performance Camillo memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories - A Donating Tears Session Suela Muca, Tirana, project/action/performance Buying Time
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