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Sensing Time
Paglen. The artist developed a collection of 100 images to represent human kind and then worked with MIT scientists to develop an ultra-archival disc, capable of lasting for billions of years, to store these images. Finally, in 2012, he sent his disc into Earth’s orbit aboard the television satellite EchoStar XVI and began broad casting. In Geographies of Time, an essay included in the book The Last Pictures, Paglen writes, ‘Earth’s new moon, EchoStar XVI, embodies the Anthropocene con tradiction between the hyperspeed of capital and the deep time of anthropo-geomorphology, the torrential flow of twenty-first-century pictures and their utter ephemerality. But EchoStar XVI holds other pictures. A modest collection to be sure but one designed to last longer than the oldest cave paintings.’ The satellite will continue orbiting the Earth for billions of years, until the Sun expands into a red giant and engulfs it. Myriad contemporary theorists have observed that our present moment is distinguished by a great techno logical shift which rivals that of the Industrial Revolu tion. These new technologies are, once again, radically reshaping our collective perception of time. Perhaps this is why we have witnessed a strong increase in interests in the pioneering era of photography among emerging photographers. The artists included in Sensing Time — Jannemarein Renout, Raphaël Dallaporta, Tim Barber and Theo Simpson — are experimenting with material and temporal aspects of the medium in order to explore our rapidly evolving relationship to time and perhaps bringing us closer to a contemporary understanding of our universe.