EVERYTHING WAS FOREVER UNTIL IT WAS NO MORE
Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man… He is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time…
—Milan Kundera, Slowness, 1996
Change is a constant and imperceptible process. Nothing remains the same and yet it often feels as if things are fixed, solid certainties. Change operates in strange ways. ‘Ta panta rhei’ (everything flows), the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed out, meaning that: everything is constantly changing, from the smallest organic particle to the whole universe. According to him, every seemingly stable object is ultimately a figment of one’s imagination; only change itself is real, being constant and in eternal flux, like the continuous flow of the river, which always renews itself and only appearsto remain the same over time. Until recently – and excluding those rarer radical moments of personal, social or political transformation – change has appeared to creep up on us slowly. But then it sometimes happens that one day we ‘wake up’ and experience a sudden break in consciousness. It abruptly dawns on us that our world has changed beyond recognition. We feel as if we have been thrust into the future, unwittingly. In recent years, and particularly since the advent of the technological revolution, it seems that even the Heraclitan constant flow of things has turned into a torrent. Our world seems to be ever accelerating. As James Gleick argues in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything: “We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday of speed”. The 1st Riga Biennial will reflect on the phenomenon of change – how it is anticipated, experienced, grasped, assimilated and dealt with at this time of accelerated transitions and the increasing speeding up of our lives.
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EVERYTHING WAS FOREVER UNTIL IT WAS NO MORE
Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man… He is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time…
—Milan Kundera, Slowness, 1996
Change is a constant and imperceptible process. Nothing remains the same and yet it often feels as if things are fixed, solid certainties. Change operates in strange ways. ‘Ta panta rhei’ (everything flows), the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed out, meaning that: everything is constantly changing, from the smallest organic particle to the whole universe. According to him, every seemingly stable object is ultimately a figment of one’s imagination; only change itself is real, being constant and in eternal flux, like the continuous flow of the river, which always renews itself and only appearsto remain the same over time. Until recently – and excluding those rarer radical moments of personal, social or political transformation – change has appeared to creep up on us slowly. But then it sometimes happens that one day we ‘wake up’ and experience a sudden break in consciousness. It abruptly dawns on us that our world has changed beyond recognition. We feel as if we have been thrust into the future, unwittingly. In recent years, and particularly since the advent of the technological revolution, it seems that even the Heraclitan constant flow of things has turned into a torrent. Our world seems to be ever accelerating. As James Gleick argues in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything: “We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday of speed”. The 1st Riga Biennial will reflect on the phenomenon of change – how it is anticipated, experienced, grasped, assimilated and dealt with at this time of accelerated transitions and the increasing speeding up of our lives.