This years’ year Sonic Acts-theme “GnillevarTime” sounds and reads like a riddle at first sight. GnillevarTime (a palindromic way of spelling “-t-ravelling Time”), can be understood in many ways; maybe I will travel time nonlinearly (what does that mean: backwards-to the future-? in a spiral? through a wave form?) or maybe the theme means that Sonic Acts will make me re:visit my experience of time completely. It is hard to say ‘right now’.
In any case, for me the Sonic Acts festival started three days early, on a monday, in a masterclass by Olaf Nicolai. So here is me re:visiting the first, three days early, very layered but somehow revealing masterclass.
Olaf Nicolai is a conceptual artist from Germany who encircles the process of repeating. In his class, Nicolai framed his work and the concept of time around the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and a psychoanalytic approach to repetition.
Nicolai started the class by asking questions like “what does time mean?”, “why should we deal with time?” and “how can time be used as a methodology?”. The audience suggested that time involves concepts like decay, progress, process, history and Nicolai (who is standing on the right in the photo) added that for the experience of time we need reflection. We can only identify ourselves (or time) through the process of reflection (which is tightly connected to reaction): without a reaction or a reflection we would never know if we really exist. Nicolai references the story of Narcissus: we need some kind of mirror to perceive ourselves (and time).
The conversation spilled into a dialectic of the present; the concept of ‘the now’ exists between the past and the future. But we can only really understand it later, after its momentum, by observation. The now is a constantly moving threshold, which is never described uniformly, Nicolai: “it is there and not there”, it is a manifold that uses different, socially or perspective-bound dimensions. As a twilight zone, it brings together the perspectives of the past (history) and the of future, which is how we are able to conceptualize it.
After Nicolais’ class, I think from now on, I will understand time through different frameworks. This means that the framework I choose to read time through will change my conception of time. I can think of time as for instance a rhythmic, a socio-historical (here time can become relative) or a procedural concept (it brings different things together).
Nicolai moved on by presenting his different uses of the concepts of repetition and reflection through his work. One way he deals with the concept of repetition is by quoting. He wonders what it means to quote, and how something can be quoted precisely? Is it possible to quote something precisely at all? Because in the end, “to quote something means to put an element into a new context”.
The return of the absolutely similar image, memory or process is impossible. As time evolves, the “thing” cannot happen again. We learn in focus, while through repetition we evolve.
Nicolai concludes that repetition is the only way of making something new.
One way (very simple, maybe even boring) way of relating to this is that todays 21.02.2012-encoding will never be repeated. Somehow, Nicolais’ inspiring first Sonic Acts masterclass gave a new dimension to this perception of the palindrome.
-by Rosa Menkman