The Speed of Broken Light: A meditation on duration and performance

Abstract

In 1900 Alfred Jarry wrote a manual for how to build a time-machine. The text was complex – involving gyroscopes, temporal inertia, and the harnessing of ether. Yet, despite its complexity, the proposition seemed plausible enough that scientists of his day took the time to disprove his theory. Perhaps they were nervous that an artist might have come up with the secret first – or perhaps they simply wondered if, in his own creative way, he wasn't on to something important. A century later, artists Christian Kuras and Ben Tanner created a slightly different machine – a time machine that, this time, actually works. The device consists of a chair and table, atop which are mounted a series of dials, switches and lights. To travel through time, one simply sits at the table and holds on. The secret of the machine, of course, is that we are already traveling through time – at a standardized rate of 60 seconds per minute, the machine redirecting our attention to the real-time passage of time as it happens. In 2011, the story got a little bit stranger, as scientists at C.E.R.N. conducted experiments in which subatomic particles seemed to break the speed of light, threatening to travel backwards in time itself. While the science was later called into question, for a moment these strange little particles seemed to have out-performed the established rules of science—opening up a space where other seemingly implausible propositions might be entertained, for a time. This is the speed of broken light – the duration of a re-enactment that precedes the actions it refers back to; a speed where the imaginary overtakes the boundaries of the real; a time without firm external referent but with deep internal implications. This essay is a meditation on the meaning of duration in a world where the speed of light has been called into question, and consequently the boundary between questions of performance, representation and duration has begun to blur.