Time and the Digital ─ Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker's Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Barker puts forward the notion that the new ways we interact with digital media, including ever-expanding digital networks and databases that house vast amounts of data, actually produce a new type of time. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, and taking examples from the history of media art as well as our daily interaction with digital technology, he strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity.

Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.

TIMOTHY SCOTT BARKER is a lecturer in digital media at the University of Glasgow and a visiting research fellow at the University of New South Wales.