6.11.1 When considering our cultural relationship to time and the clash of the industrial time based on end product vs. the attention/communication time, one cannot help but summon the Italian futurists at the beginning of the century. In 1909, Marinetti crashed his car as he hurtled towards an apocalyptic future in which people would be outstripped by their machines. He ushered in a new morality, calling speed good and slowness evil. In 1898, the speed record of a car was thirty-nine miles per hour. In 1997, a jet car broke the sound barrier in the Nevada desert, hurtling across the saline waste at 763 mph.

6.11.2 The culture of velocity that Marinetti welcomed at the beginning of the century, which brought with it much progress and destruction simultaneously, is reaching climax with the Y2K bug. To keep up, we have learned the skills of simultaneity and are pushing the limits of what an individual can do. The next step is logically towards a group consciousness. Art projects utilising complicated technological tools are developed and produced by teams, rarely by individuals.

6.11.3 Art, traditionally a resort of meditative stillness, became preoccupied with motion. In 1912, Marcel Duchamp incited a scandal with his Nude Descending a Staircase; Eadward Mybridge used the camera to analyse the mysteries of locomotion; cinema speed accelerated; and even architecture is not conceived of as fixed.

6.11.4 Einstein explained that the inertia of matter increases with acceleration. Therefore the faster we go, the more damage we do to ourselves and others. Through the twentieth century, war, as Paul Virilio argues, has served as a 'speed factory.' Computer technology is inexorably connected to the military, which is again connected to commerce. How artists working with these same technologies intersect is yet to be seen. Just as we have to expand our idea of networks beyond the Internet, and our idea of the individual body to a collective, so too we have to expand the idea of commerce beyond the material, monetary exchange of goods to knowledge sharing.

6.11.5 In chapter 4, I described my experience with the audience driving the project, Bodies Incorporated, with certain demand which I would respond to. Once I have satisfied the calls for 'seeing the bodies' and deleting them if they wanted to (via Necropolis), the most persistent demand for me to address was the desire for some kind of community. This forced me to consider all the issues I raised above and think about conceptualising a community of people with no time. In other words, it occurred to me that people who are most interesting to me are those who have the least time, and probably would not be able to spend time chatting on the net. The challenge, then, was to think of a community that required no synchronous presence and a system that would create more time for people to communicate with each other. [top]