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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.

On Being Alive

ON BEING ALIVE

GUISEPPE SALZA: You have written ‘Virtual Light’. So, what do you think of Virtual Reality?

If we take what I consider the ‘Sunday paper supplement’ of VR, I mean Goggles & Gloves, I think that it has become very obvious, very cliche. I think that real VR is gonna come out from the new generation of visual effects in movies. I met Jim Cameron when he was editing ‘Terminator 2’: he showed me the clips of the T-1000 emerging from fire in the L.A. canal. He said they were gonna use the actor for the whole shot, but it was easier for them to do it in digital. This is the future. One day there will be entire virtual replicas of real actors.

Incidentally, the book I’m writing now is about virtual celebrities.It’s the story of a guy who becomes obsessed with the virtual replica of a star, and falls in love with her.