Atemporalities
ATTEMPORALITIES
One day, if our species is still around, all of these trademarks and symbols in Doug Coupland’s charmingly unsettling image-series will be from the same time: really a long time ago. That’s one kind of atemporality, the kind afforded by the long view, by deep time. In deep time, the incremental is the insignificant. In deep time, a century is a nanosecond. Less. Our universe is located in deep time, and that’s more unsettling to any flavor of fundamentalism than is evolution. A special awareness of decades, cycles of ten circumnavigations of the sun, is indicative of a creature unlikely to experience nine decades. Subjective time, for such creatures (ourselves) is a cultural construct, and rather flexible, though its flexing, like most kinds of change, tends to make us uneasy.
