Non-Linear Embodied Experiences

Nostalgia, fluidity, and stagnation. These are difficult topics to discuss without also bringing to light your perception of time. When asked to define the past, what comes to your mind? Many people would describe it as a linear timeline of events that is supported and upheld through evidence and remembrance. As I sat through this roundtable, I felt the idea of the past as a concept and how it is individually interpreted being questioned. My own memories were laid before me, the very things that helped shape who I am. I began to feel that even my own liberal ideas of how to perceive time were being challenged.

Memory, identity, and the body actively shape how time is perceived. Through these mediums, time is often warped, looped, or even lingers. When we reflect on a memory, our feelings about that particular moment will change depending on our current sense of identity and understanding. What happened, happened, yes - but the meaning is never fixed. When we remember the past, we filter it through the current lens of the present. It is then changed and reshaped by who we have become, what we have survived, and what we are still imagining for the future. Memory is not a still, perfect moment. It is a living, breathing entity.

However, we cannot discuss time without thinking about the way that we capture it: media. Throughout history, the way media is viewed and perceived has constantly changed. When you think about it, media tries to imitate non-linear time without inhabiting it in a physical way. Unlike memory, identity, and the body - which are personal, somatic, and fluid - media instead will fixate itself into moments that can easily be replayed, recirculated, and detached from the original meaning. It externalizes time while pretending to stabilize it, and because media is tangible, it is the primary way we try to understand time.

These ideas come to a focal point when you consider the degradation of media. Photographs and video capture a moment, but their significance will vary depending on the viewer’s interpretation. Archival practices and media platforms (whether digital or physical) draw attention to this as well. When files degrade, formats then become obsolete. We all know content circulates and changes endlessly, creating never-ending loops that, when you think about it, defy our linear conceptions of past, present, and future.

My favorite question brought up at the roundtable was “How has media evolved to be nostalgic toward cultural “slop,” a meme of a meme, rather than toward the texture of lived, human experience?” While I’m sure there are many other ways to describe this experience, my mind immediately went to the “memeification” of the 9/11 attacks. For those who are reading that are not as chronically online as some of us may be, “the “memeification” of the 9/11 attacks” refers to the widespread internet phenomenon where the historical significance of 9/11 has become totally removed from the initial tragedy, and has instead turned into an endlessly reproducible symbol detached from the original context. There are many ways I could break down why this happened in the particular instance of the 9/11 attacks, and many other examples I could give (think of any popular meme image that has been removed from its context), but I think the point remains. Media is marked by repetition, and the quick-paced atmosphere of social media only hastens the process.

As I stated before, time often warps, loops, and lingers in ways that do not follow a straight line, and it is often turned into content for consumption. Our lived experience keeps time layered and complex and ever-changing. It is not something that is for sale. Media shapes how we document time, and therefore how we perceive it, but it cannot contain or limit it. I believe that the richest understanding of time exists outside of media. Non-linear, embodied experiences exist outside of circulation and offer the world a more human view of temporal understanding.