The Attempt to Be Here Now: “Storying” Time through a Virtual Audiovisual Archive

Abstract

This article explores how conceptions of time are visualised and “storied” in the collaborative photography and video project Hemelliggaam or the Attempt to Be Here Now by Cape Town-based artists Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler. Hemelliggaam is a digital audiovisual archive of photography and video installations “exploring the existential aspects of the human–environment– astronomy relationship” (https://hemelliggaam.squarespace.com/about). Through analysing a selection of photographs and videos, my investigation attempts to unravel the human–environment–astronomy relationship as it plays out in various narratives in the virtual archive. Combining representations of astronomic sites, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project in Carnarvon, with fragments of Afrikaans author Jan Rabie’s mid-century sci-fi novels, the archive seeks to visualise the multifaceted complexity of human engagements with time. I argue that Hemelliggaam, as an audiovisual archive that contextualises time through geology, astronomy, mythology, and science fiction, should be recognised as a project visualising the overlapping of different timescales. The article contextualises Hemelliggaam in contemporary discourses of the Anthropocene, specifically Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea that a critical framing of the topic needs to recognise the differences between human- historical time and geological-planetary time. By examining the “storying” of overlapped timescales, I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach acknowledging the contributions of both the sciences and the humanities to meaning-making is increasingly relevant to our age of planetary crisis.