Technology and Time: Monument, spoliant, excavation/folly

'Technology and Time: Monument, spoliant, excavation/folly' is a 40 minute presentation, the opening claim of which is “Art battles over time. Art is the contestation of temporality.” The first part of the talk develops this claim through cultural examples, opening upon the anthropo-technical horizon of Leroi Gourhan and the autonomous technical time of Gilbert Simondon and Wolfgang Ernst. Bernard Stiegler’s development of the work of these writers is also advanced. The presentation develops from examples such as Lou Reed’s ‘progressive’, ‘avante gardist’, ‘Metal Machine Music’ and its subsequent, anachronistic, orchestration by Berlin ensemble ‘Zeitkratrzer’ towards claims concerning archaeology and time. Throughout, the talk is interspersed with the voice of Robert Smithson, providing instruction to the slide carousel operator during his 1972 talk ‘Hotel Palenque’. This recorded audio interjection brings the first half of the talk into play with the stakes of the second half of the talk in which the archaeological stations of Monument, Spoliant and Excavation/Folly are used to consider the technological, psychic and economic processes of accumulation, circulation and calculation.