Exploring Asynchronic Experiences – Seven Motifs: A Zettelkasten as (Filmic) Research Method

Abstract

In order to investigate asynchronic experiences, the doctoral research project Face No Dial of a Clock explores life situations where contradictory rhythms, incommensurable temporalities, and unpredictable timings occur. Asynchronicities open up between subjective perceptions, affects, and collective time conventions. To observe states of asynchronicity, I have chosen several concrete "cases" where a personal account of time does not correspond necessarily with social chrononormative time concepts. The collected materials in these quests did mainly take form by filmic means such as documentary footage, staged displays, montage techniques and voice-over narration. The present text draws on thinking processes which occur in the (re-)assemblages and (re-) configurations of the collected materials in my filmic practice. I relate my method to the Zettelkasten (slip box), 1 by which I tempt to evince, in a figurative sense, how this dealing with textual and filmic material provokes thinking processes. In seven motifs emerging from the filmic footage and montage effects, relations and reflections about the theoretical discourse on the present sense of time within acceleration, simultaneity and hyper-fragmentation are introduced. These seven motifs serve as prisms shedding light on the filmic thinking which evolves in the back and forth between participant observation, shooting decisions, editing and non-linear voice-over development. The kind of filmic thinking I develop through moving images and language has as its aim that embodied thinking contributes to new forms of knowledge about asynchronic experiences. How does the present self-responsabilisation of time management condition one's subjectivation processes? Where and how is asynchronicity constituted? And what are the effects of asynchronic time experiences? My inquiry started from personal experiences of stress and dealing with interiorized imperatives of productivity and efficiency. By looking into the discourses of acceleration including everyday concerns with speeding up and technological immediacy, I realized that such time conceptions remain in a spatial understanding of time (rationalization) and lack the cultural dimension of temporal politics. Rather than an indi-vidualistic approach to time concerned with control and management, my artistic investigation aims to grasp through my filmic practice how time is differentially experienced in various, concrete situations and how rhythms are always relational. To observe states of asynchronicity, I have chosen several concrete "cases" where a personal account of time does not correspond necessarily with social chrononormative time concepts. My quest for life situations not 1 I refer to Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten, which he described as a "second brain"-not in the sense of an memory aid, mnemotic tool or computer mind, but rather as a dialogue partner with its own intelligence and inherent complexity going beyond the authors imagination. Without the slips, Luhmann said, only by pondering, he would never have come to the ideas he had. Unless his own contribution was of course crucial to put down the notes, he claimed not to be solely responsible for the ideas. André Kieserling, the current professor of the Luhmann chair, describes the Zettelkasten method as a way to let yourself surprise by what you once thought considering totally different aspects. For him it's a method to do findings which one was not looking for, but which one can use. Based on this understanding, the Zettelkasten method is for me an attempt to come to unfamiliar considerations within my (filmic) thinking processes by unexpected (re-)assemblages of fragmented materials.