It's About Time - A Visual Novel

IT’S ABOUT TIME

Written and Illustrated by

Aakansha Kukreja

Š 2014 Aakansha Kukreja, All Rights Reserved.

Printed at KolorKode, Bangalore.

IT’S ABOUT TIME

Written and Illustrated by

Aakansha Kukreja Under the guidance of Alison Byrnes for Visual Narrative Design II at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology.

Based on the Novel “Time Warped”

by Claudia Hammond

To my family and all my friends for their love, tolerance and support.

Thank you, Alison Byrnes for the opportunity, direction and inspiration; Matt Lee for your guidance and encouragement.

CONTENTS Time and space Map your memory Time is brief Store some things

Time Time and and Space Space

Looking for before and looking for after, the after becomes the before and we look again.

Attention, emotion & memory affect our judgement of time.

Distractions often steal us away from what’s going on in front of us.

We can sense, see, hear and experience it; but there is no organ solely for sensing time.

Different minds visualise their time in their own ways.

It can go around in a loop or stand in a queue.

Could it even be like a slinky?

A slinky can perform a number of tricks, including travelling down a flight of steps end-to-end as it stretches and re-forms itself with the aid of gravity and its own momentum.

The way we visualize or understand time is also affected by the words we used and our dialects.

In English we say ‘Long’ time - implying distance.

The Spanish use the term “Mucho Tiempo” which means ‘Much Time’- implying quantity or largeness.

In the Amondawa tribe that lives in the Amazon, no word for ‘time’ exists.

We slow down time when we experience a moment of ecstatic disbelief or we’re gripped by extreme fear.

The slow motion car crash we’ve seen on screen is actually a cognitive reality.

The best night(s) of your life and the scariest moment(s) of your life still hold those tags. These events seem to have occurred for a longer duration than would be measured in seconds or minutes.

Map Map your your memory memory

The experience of time is created in our minds so that we can alter and edit the parts we find troubling.

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The memory of something unhappy can be locked up and pushed away until we forget it or let other memories occupy it’s place.

Memories are constantly being created due to the impermanent nature of our surroundings.

But only the strongest ones survive.

Ofcourse, there are exceptions to each theory. A woman named Jill Price co-wrote a book called, ‘The Woman Who Can’t Forget’; a memoir of the abiltiy (or curse) of her brain to recite the details of every day of her life since she was fourteen years old.

Over-time, we experience and collect memories.

Time has an impact on memory. But memory, too, has an impact on time.

The influence of memories from the past directs our present. Today is only a conscious attempt to improve on our yesterday-self.

We select the memories that last longer.

This is quite similar to selective reality.

We pick out the toys we keep (from when we were younger) long past the age when playing is a part of daily life.

It is memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time. It not only gives us the ability to conjure up a past experience at will, but to reflect on those thoughts through auto-noetic consciousness (the sense that we have of ourselves as existing across time).

Every memory is a recreation and not a playback.

The conscious memories are neatly placed in our minds. Perhaps one day we will each have a digital library of memories that will allow us to re-experience any given day of our lives.

As children, we try new things, and we absorb and learn about the world around us.

But the most vivid of these memories come from when we were 15-25 years of age.

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This age is the time for first novelties – the first job, first sexual relationship, first travels alone, first time living alone.

These memories are novel.

One such novelty is our discovery of what we think love is; probably influenced by the different sitcoms we watch or the books we read.

This may or may not be love, it just feels like OUR idea of what love is supposed to feel like. This is what we think a “good” memory is supposed to feel like.

We crave to experience this “novelty”. Is the craving better than the obtaining itself? The waiting is almost sweeter than the wanting, the feeling of being wanted, of wanting to be the proud prize.

When we remember an event, the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ of the event is remembered but the ‘when’ doesn’t feature as much. Could this be suggestive of the fact that the date or day is intangible or insignificant?

The purpose of the calendar is to reckon past or future time, to show how many days until a certain event takes place (the harvest or a religious festival) or how long since something important happened. The earliest calendars were strongly influenced by the geographical location of the people who made them.

In colder countries, the concept of the year was determined by the seasons, specifically by the end of winter. But in warmer countries, where the seasons are less pronounced, the Moon became the basic unit for time reckoning; an old Jewish book says that “the Moon was created for the counting of the days.”

Memories are temporary and dynamic. The memory of something, good or bad, and the feeling associated with it doesn’t last too long because whatever or whoever created that memory doesn’t last too long.

We use the clarity of a memory as a guide to it’s recency. If the memory seems faded or the details seem skewed and unclear, we assumed the experience occurred longer ago.

Time Time is is brief brief

A monk once said, “We’re never human BEINGS, we’re human DOINGS- always doing, doing, doing. ”

A large amount of impermanence begins to occupy our daily life. Like vapour that goes up; It is given a sort of hotel room in the cloud temporarily, until of course it’s a drop amongst many in a lake.

Emotion, action, conviction, inspiration, obsession, self-conclusion, commitment, purpose, justification and belief are all temporary.

The way we perceive what has happened may seem permanent, but permanence is only extended temporariness.

Nostalgia is tricky– we consider it to be warm and positive, but it includes tones of loss and perhaps longing for a happier past.

We are stuck in that “Happier Past”.

. Like the Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron.

Going back into the past serves a function in altering our identity, and can be reassuring. Nostalgia is social, it reinforces connections. When we share so many memories with the world, how can we be alone?

Time is like a river moving along the banks. When things seem stagnant or stuck in a place we are unhappy in, it is essential that we know this halt is short-lived. The length of the river or the extent of the stagnant nature is unknown.

Moving forward is moving on.

Meaningful distractions act as fuel to drive forward, to accelerate the temporariness. We are constantly looking to replace the old with the new, until the new is ready to be replaced with another new.

When permanence is hidden away it is assigned the temporary attribute of being in the past. This of course, is only until we remember or have tangible evidence of it.

Store Store some some things things

Objects either serve a function or give face to an emotion we experience.

We often find ourselves attached to our favourite cushions, our phones, and our “lucky” pencils. Perhaps, it’s because we control their loyalty or existence in our lives.

Materialism is a tangible hope for permanence.

We can see/hear/touch/taste these things and would have to lose them or wear them out before we could forget them. Photographs play a large part in attributing the tangible quality to memories.

In today’s social media-age, we still remember what someone ate for breakfast yesterday.

Because we like to relive the happy or successful memories, photographs are a convenient way to make these moments tangible.

The tempo of life has generally changed and we might find ourselves being attached to materialistic objects in this consumer world.

We often hear of “retail therapy�, which is merely a replacement of a bad memory or moment in our lives by something tangible and more permanent.

The fact that objects don’t have minds of their own helps us to believe that they will stay with us for as long as we want. That means we control the extent of our memory and how long it lasts.

When we buy people “presents�, in the hope of our relationship with them lasting longer and for them to have something tangible to remember us by; we are simply adding shelf-life to our relationship.

We are scared of the impermanence of our connections or relationships with people but use materialism to deny it.

Obviously, objects cannot love back or express emotion and action. But they are relatively more permanent than the relationships we experience.

A Tamagotchi is a keychain-sized virtual pet simulation game created in 1996 for people of all ages. Upon activating, an egg appears on the screen which eventually hatches and lets your customize your own pet.

We are always looking to earn more money, and it becomes a matter of greed. We are greedy to obtain copious amounts of ability to buy stuff. This ability could also be considered as a sort of materialism.

Power and control make us feel secure and materialism facilitates that.

The statements made here aren’t trying to opinionate that we should give up our faith in the permanence of humanity and relationships with other people but simply have a different, less permanent, perspective on it. The way we behave and react changes with our personality, which changes as we age.

Like the flowing river, time takes us to new terrains and grounds where we receive fresh perspectives and form new memories that help us let go of the old ones, if need be. We also create, receive and collect the tangible in order to collect the memories and remember them for longer.

This book is a materialistic transgression of such ideas to your mind; like all other media its effects are temporary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY READING MATERIAL: Claudia Hammond - ‘Time Warped: Unlocking the mysteries of Time Perception’ Theodore Stcherbatsky - ‘Buddhist Logic Vol 2’ Sean Carroll - ‘From Eternity to Here’

IMAGERY: http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css/functions/cross-fade http://www.stockvault.net/ http://www.theguardian.com/how-to-survive-summer-holidays, Photo by Alamy http://www.arango-design.com/bracelet-gunmetal-p/8026.html http://www.ikea.com/aa/en/catalog/products/80160, Photo by Michelle

A book about our warped perception of time, emotion, memory, the impermanent nature of our existence and the hidden, shallow materialist within all of us.