David Fagan

Time is not a static object, nor is it viewable or recordable in its entirety. We cannot trust recorded media as truth, because truth would encompass all things at once, the universe in its entirety, recorded and understood from many opposing standpoints.

What is recorded of time is complicated by the fact that the one who records mediates the subject, and the one who replays mediates what is replayed.

What we do have; is individual experience of time, where memories slip and resurface in the present. Our ideas are generated internally. When one tries to explain ideas in the world outside of ones self they, by default, fail to communicate verbatim, given that language is itself a translation of thought to words. Yet ideas can find salvation, in new interpretation of those who view that which we can create.

The manifestation of a utopia in the built environment then, it would seem, is impossible. For we would each experience a utopian built environment differently.

“Impermanence is in some mysterious way of course the key to the actualization of any utopia.” (Mark von Schlegell, 2006)

The individual can experience a temporal moment that feels utopian. This is a lived moment where inner thoughts and outer environment meet seamlessly.

Utopia is not a fixed ideal; perhaps we have experienced what it is to live in a utopian environment for just a fleeting moment of our lives. The mind, it would seem is in a continual state of flux, tentative moments of stability form time to time, and perhaps in one of these moments, one views the world around us as utopian.

“Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers.” (Novolis, 1897)

I like this description of life as a singular continuum regardless of which humans possess it. Although, if our individual knowledge of life is our consciousness of time; this communality of life would seem to run contrary to my previous assumptions of the individuals experience of memory.

Tino Sehgal’s work ‘This Progress’ at the Gugenheim, involves the viewer being asked by a child museum guide, “What is progress?” Thus forcing a verbal answer to what is an emotional idea. The young museum guide relays, to the next, slightly older guide, the viewer’s opinion of progress and in doing so, reveals the fallibility of language and time constraints in expressing ones thoughts.

The viewer; having given an off the cuff answer to a question which requires more time to answer than is allocated; is tied to this answer, which may not represent their opinion.

The more one chases a definition to of time, memory or truth, the more those terms reveal their definitions to be stunningly elusive.