Time (In)dependent Manipulation Experience

A practical experiment on the experience of time within the framework of the Wunderkammer Project of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts Stijn Kuipers, Chris Hillen, Carcom Sheffer, Stach Kuijpers

When no one asks me what time is, I know exactly what it is; when I want to explain to someone what time is, then I would not have the slightest clue Augustine1 Time is one of the fundamental experiences of human existence. At least since the emergence of written history - conventionally dated around 4000 B.C.E. – has time fascinated and baffled people. Augustine’s quote is illustrative for time’s allure. However, his nescience towards and confusion with time did not withhold him from writing extensively on the subject. Neither did it stop the great philosopher Aristotle approximately 600 year before him. Aristotle defined time as closely related to movement; movement can be ascertained through time, while time becomes visible through movement. In other words, time and movement are interdependent and make each other possible. The changes brought about in the world by motion can be measured and calculated through time and with that, time becomes an instrument of categorization and measurement.2 This definition of time has often been interpreted as an argument for the existence of an ‘objective’ sort of time, independent of the beholder. Although this might strike many of us as being true, it also raises a problem; is time so objective as this definition seems to presume? Is the existence of time not dependent on the experience of time? The fact that time can go slower, such as when someone is gripped with mortal fear (‘time seemed to freeze’),3 or faster, such as when someone is having a lot of fun (‘time flies when you’re having fun’), seems to point at an aspect of time that is dependent on, or closely related to the perception of the perceiver. Although Aristotle seems to have been aware of this, seeing that his definition of time as ‘the number’ or ‘the counted’ seems to be dependent on someone who does the counting,4 it was the above named Augustine who made this very question central to his inquiry into the essence of time. Confronted with the fleeting character of time, he reckoned that the past is no more and the future has yet to become. The contemporary, he stated, is so momentary that we would better speak of the non-existence of time. For example, when you say ‘now’, the moment you referred to is already gone. Past, present and future are nothing more than ‘distentio animi’, conjured by and existing in the expansiveness of the human

1

Augustinus (edited by G. Wijdeveld), Belijdenissen, (Amsterdam, 1997), 272. Quote paraphrased and translated by Stijn Kuipers. 2 Aristotle, (edited by W.D. Ross), Physics. The works of Aristotle II., (Oxford, 1947), 219b and 220a, as quoted in: Harry Jansen, Triptiek van de tijd. Geschiedenis in drievoud, Uitgeverij Vantilt, (Nijmegen, 2010), 308. 3 So called ‘Chronostasis’. See: Iona Hodinott-Hill, Kai V. Thilo, Alan Cowey and Vincent Walsh, ‘Auditory Chronostasis. Hanging on the Telephone’, Current Biology 12:20, (15 October 2002), 1779-1781, http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2802%29012198?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982202012198%3Fshowall%3 Dtrue [checked for the last time on 4 March 2016]. 4 Aristotle, Physics. The works of Aristotle II, 223a and 21-28.

mind.5 Despite this ‘focus’ on subjective time, Augustine does not deny the existence of an ‘objective’ sort of time, as Aristotle did not gainsay the existence of a subjective one. Although time in Augustine’s view is a ‘fleeting and imperfect conjuration’ of the human mind, it has also been created by God, and must therefore exist ‘objectively’ in the outside world. Furthermore, because of his Christian theological views, he also links time to the eternity in God. Although imperfect now, time strives to become one with eternity, like all things; God is perfect and therefore, everything on earth is a reflection of his perfectness. There are even some examples of the connections between past, present and future here on earth and with that of the wholeness of God and eternity. Because this might sound a little hazy, Augustine exemplified this with reference to listening to a psalm: we do not listen to the separate notes and chords – the ‘now’ – but remember the parts that have already been sung, and anticipate, breath taken, what is still to come.6 With that, Augustine underlines the way we humans can only experience our time in the world in an imperfect way, but he does not deny the existence of an objective time. The famous German philosopher Kant exemplified both ‘sides’ further. On the one hand does he define time as a mere way of observation, an ‘Anschauungsform’. In his own words: ‘…time is nothing more than a subjective condition for human perception … and on its own, outside of the subject, nothing.’7 Although this seems to point at the ‘rightness’ of the subjective definition of time, we ought to notice that Kant speaks not of ‘one’ human, but of humans in general. With that, this ‘Anschauungsform’ becomes a universal way of looking and with that, Kant underlines a general human experience with time. With that, time becomes ‘objective’;8 without diving too deep into Kant’s philosophy, this can be exemplified by looking at the relationship between space and time already discerned by Aristotle here above. Time ‘flows’; there is causality. When I drop an egg, it cannot go back to its former state. This sequence of time points at an objective spatial dimension of time.9 Our last philosopher, the Austrian Edmund Husserl, again emphasized the subjective experience of time. He speaks of ‘retention’, holding on to pieces of the past such as experience or trauma, most often through memories. This can lead to a ‘historical experience’ or a ‘mémoire involontaire’, such as 5

Augustinus, Belijdenissen, XI, XXVi, 33; Robin Le Poidevin, ‘The Experience and Perception of Time’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Monday 6 April 2015), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/#1 [last checked on 8 March 2016]. 6 Ibidem, XI, XXViii, 38. 7 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft I, (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), A 35, B 51, as quoted in: Harry Jansen, Triptiek van de tijd. Geschiedenis in drievoud, 309, 495. ‘A’ refers to the first edition of 1781, B to the edition 1787, in which text has been added which was not present in the first edition. Translation of the quote into English by Stijn Kuipers. 8 Time is for Kant ‘… in Ansehung aller Erscheinungen, mithin auch aller Dinge, die uns in der Erfahrung vorkommen können, notwendigerweise objektiv’. See: Ibidem. 9 Ibidem, 150-152 (B154-156).

when one eats an apple pie the smell and taste of warm cinnamon ‘brings one back to his youth’.10 This retention of time points to the fact that time can go both fast as well as slow, as we already concluded here above when discussing the ideas of Augustine. And exactly this is what we as a group within the Wunderkammer project were intrigued with.

We humans tend to consider time as objectively given and have categorized our societies around the clock, especially since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. However, as might be concluded from the above, ‘time is in the eye of the beholder’, despite the probable existence of objective time. And this (human) perception of time is flawed.11 Not only is it depended on circumstances, such as when confronted with mortal fear, but also on all sorts of internal factors, such as the level of novelty of (new) experiences. By confronting an audience with the divergence between the actual passed amount of time and what they thought to be the time that had passed, we hoped to make people aware of this ‘mystery of time’ and with that, make them ‘Wunder’, in line with the encompassing project of which our experiment was a part.

The experiment For our experiment, we wanted to investigate qualitative relations between the perception of time during a performance and the way the performance was experienced. In order to do so, we composed a questionnaire consisting of some general questions and a set of questions to be answered during a performance. The surveys were handed out during the Wunderkammer meets Lavinia ‘Cultuur op de Campus’ event and filled in over the course of the last three performances before the break (see the appendix for one of those surveys).

10

Harry Jansen, Triptiek van de tijd. Geschiedenis in drievoud, 310. Barry Dainton, ‘Temporal Consciousness’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Friday 6 August 2010), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/ [last checked on 8 March 2016]; Maria Popova, ‘Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation’, Brainpickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/15/time-warped-claudia-hammond/ [last checked on 8 March 2016]. It might be interesting to note that also (other) animals experience time as humans do, influenced by all sorts of factors, such as speed of movement and metabolism. See: Kevin Healy, Luke McNally, Graeme D. Ruxton, Natalie Cooper, Andrew L. Jackson, ‘Metabolic rate and body size are linked with perception of temporal information’, Animal Behaviour, (2013), http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347213003060 [last checked on 8 March 2016]. For a ‘humane’ readable article on this very paper, see: Trinity College Dublin, ‘Time is in the eye of the beholder: Time perception in animals depends on their pace of life’, Sciencedaily, (16 September 2013), http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130916102006.htm [checked for the last time on 8 March 2016]. 11

The most important question we asked the audience was: “By estimation, how long did the performance take?” We had hoped to draw some conclusions based on this estimated time and the audience’s answers to the other questions. For example: a cliché is that time flies when you’re having fun. By asking the audience how much they enjoyed, we would be able to check whether people that enjoyed a performance underestimated its length. A challenge we faced was the limited time to process all the data. Our solution was to write a computer program that checked for all possible relations in the data. Each step of the program, it choses two questions, graphs them and checks for a relation between them by a method called linear regression. The more the points are located on a line and the steeper that line, the better the correlation. If the points are oriented randomly, the correlation is bad and we get a flat line. Only the best results were outputted on screen to show to the audience after the break. Unfortunately, no graphs remained that indicated a relation of the estimated duration a performance with any of the other questions. Only by almost completely removing the threshold for showing a graph, relations with the estimated time became visible. In fact, the worst graph belonged to the cliché that time flies when you’re having fun (Figure 2). As we can see, the distribution for the estimated performance length is about the same, independent of the indicated amount of enjoyment felt. Based on this it seems that time doesn’t fly nor crawl, whether one is nid-noddling from boredom or bouncing from excitement. Luckely, we were also able to confirm a cliche, although it had nothing to do with time. One of the few graphs that did indicate a significant relation is depicted in Figure 1. It shows that people who feel younger than they actually are (the negative side of the horizontal axis) tend to feel more joy than people who feel older than they actually are. Of course, all of the data is discutable concerning the relatively small data pool (40 people during 3 performances). Nervertheless we ought to bear in mind is that the experiment could easily be repeated and upscaled. A conclusion we can draw irrespectively of this data is that 4 students from both ArtEZ and the Radboud University succesfully worked together to design and perform a multidisciplinairy experiment. Thereby, we shaped a piece to be presented our modern-day Wunderkammer.

Figure 2: The estimated performance length plotted against the indicated amount of enjoyment felt.

Figure 1: The indicated amount of enjoyment felt plotted against the perceived minus the actual age.

Bibliography -

Aristotle, (edited by W.D. Ross), Physics. The works of Aristotle II., (Oxford, 1947

-

Augustinus (edited by G. Wijdeveld), Belijdenissen, (Amsterdam, 1997),

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Dainton, Barry, ‘Temporal Consciousness’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Friday 6 August 2010), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/ [last checked on 8 March 2016]; Popova, Maria , ‘Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age,

and

Gets

Warped

on

Vacation’,

Brainpickings,

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/15/time-warped-claudia-hammond/ [last checked on 8 March 2016 -

Healy, Kevin, Luke McNally, Graeme D. Ruxton, Natalie Cooper, Andrew L. Jackson, ‘Metabolic rate and body size are linked with perception of temporal information’, Animal Behaviour, (2013), http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347213003060 [last checked on 8 March 2016].

-

Hodinott-Hill, Iona, Kai V. Thilo, Alan Cowey and Vincent Walsh, ‘Auditory Chronostasis. Hanging on

the

Telephone’,

Current

Biology

12:20,

(15

October

2002),

1779-1781,

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2802%29012198?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982202012 198%3Fshowall%3Dtrue [checked for the last time on 4 March 2016]. -

Jansen, Harry , Triptiek van de tijd. Geschiedenis in drievoud, Uitgeverij Vantilt, (Nijmegen, 2010)

-

Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft I, (Frankfurt am Main, 1968),

-

Poidevin, Robin Le, ‘The Experience and Perception of Time’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Monday 6 April 2015), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/#1 [last checked on 8 March 2016].

-

Trinity College Dublin, ‘Time is in the eye of the beholder: Time perception in animals depends on

their

pace

of

life’,

Sciencedaily,

(16

September

2013),

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130916102006.htm [checked for the last time on 8 March 2016].

Wunderkammer meets Lavinia

Time Experience Survey 17-2-2016 #«Number» As a part of the Wunderkammer project, we would like to ask your opinion on the upcoming three performances, alongside some general information about you. By answering these questions, you greatly contribute to our research on the experience of time. Note that none of your answers will be linked to you personally.

0. General Questions How old are you?

How old do you feel?

Are you a male or a female? Male

Female

1. First performance: Singing & bass By estimation, how long did the performance take? Please give your answer in seconds, you may round of to a plural of ten.

Please rate on a scale from 1 to 5: Did you enjoy the performance? Not so much

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5

Very much

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Very much

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Very much

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Very much

Could you relate to the performance? Not so much

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Did you feel excited during the performance? Not so much

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Did you feel touched during the performance? Not so much

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3

Did you feel agitated during the performance? Not so much

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Very much

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Very much

Did you feel sad during the performance? Not so much

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2. Second performance: Harp solo by Lavinia By estimation, how long did the performance take? Please give your answer in seconds, you may round of to a plural of ten.

Please rate on a scale from 1 to 5: Did you enjoy the performance? Not so much

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2

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4

5

Very much

3

4

5

Very much

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Very much

4

5

Very much

3

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Very much

3

4

5

Very much

Could you relate to the performance? Not so much

1

2

Did you feel excited during the performance? Not so much

1

2

Did you feel touched during the performance? Not so much

1

2

3

Did you feel agitated during the performance? Not so much

1

2

Did you feel sad during the performance? Not so much

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3. Third performance: Four Cat Stories By estimation, how long did the performance take? Please give your answer in seconds, you may round of to a plural of ten.

Please rate on a scale from 1 to 5: Did you enjoy the performance? Not so much

1

2

3

4

5

Very much

3

4

5

Very much

3

4

5

Very much

4

5

Very much

3

4

5

Very much

3

4

5

Very much

Could you relate to the performance? Not so much

1

2

Did you feel excited during the performance? Not so much

1

2

Did you feel touched during the performance? Not so much

1

2

3

Did you feel agitated during the performance? Not so much

1

2

Did you feel sad during the performance? Not so much

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2

End of the survey Thank you very much for your cooperation. At the start of the break, this survey will be collected by the students of the “Time Experience” group of the Wunderkammer project. The results of the survey will be discussed later on the evening.