Afterword

Abstract

Afterword Shepherd Steiner Mosaic issue 54.2 is a special archival issue developed as the first part of a collaborative project with the Dutch artist team Bik Van der Pol. The second part involves a collaborative project hinging on a series of lectures that will be published in a subsequent issue. Relative Time/Little Time concentrates on the flow or pace of current time, especially in relation to past time. We are particularly interested in the different granularity of current time relative to the period beginning in 1989, which marked a decisive acceleration of economy, growth, extraction, globalism, movement, population, transportation, etc., and ending in 2020, when over a few weeks the world came to a halt under the influence of the pandemic that spread as rapidly and widely as people, commodities, and capital once moved. We wonder what the compression and contraction of time into these discrete units of temporal flow suggest? We wonder how to conceptualize the transference and exchange of time stamps between production quotas and life at the microbiological level, not to mention the palimpsest-like construction of these times we live? Does the elasticity between periods on either side of the divide provide the momentum we need to think the future, which is such an uncertain time at this point? Might this relate to attempts to get the system moving again in a new direction? How can Indigenous knowledges, the Green New Deal, Black Lives Matter, or decolonizing perspectives from the global South forge a new future from out of the context of relative time? [End Page 201] The participants include: Frédéric Neyrat, Associate Professor and Mellon-Morgridge Professor of Planetary Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the editorial board of Multitudes and his books include Biopolitique des catastrophes (2008), L'indemne. Heidegger et la destruction du monde (2008), Instructions pour une prise d'âmes: Artaud ar l'envoûtement occidental (2009), Clinamen: Flux, absolu et loi spirale (2011), Le communisme existential de Jean-Luc Nancy (2013), Homo Labyrinthus. Humanisme, antihumanisme, posthumanisme (2015), Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (2017), and The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (2019). Erin Manning, University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is the director of SenseLab, "a laboratory for thought in motion," which brings together individuals from a diversity of fields to work at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism. Her books include Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009), Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance (2013), Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (with Brian Massumi, 2014), and The Minor Gesture (2016). Jonas Staal, a visual artist dealing primarily with the relation between art, propaganda, and democracy. With lawyer and writer Radha D'Souza he is developing the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes. This attempts to articulate a legal framework for interdependent and intergenerational climate justice. Intersecting temporalities of past and present as well as unborn plant, animal, and human life in the future are the key issues broached. His books include Nosso Lar, Brasilia (2014), Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (2018), and Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (2019). With Dilar Dirik and Renée In der Mauer he co-edited Stateless Democracy (2015). Dr. Dominic Pettman, Professor of Media and New Humanities at the New School of Social Research. His books include After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (2002), Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (with Justin Clemens, 2004), Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (2006), Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (2011), Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (2013), In Divisible Cities (2013), Infinite Distraction (2015), Humid, All too Humid (2016), Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (2017), Creaturely Love (2017), Metagestures (with Carla Nappi, 2019), and Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire (2020). Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, New York based collaborative artists who use photography. Their primary focus is what they call the transportation of place—situations [End Page 202] in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant one. Accepted as genuine...