Navigating time - diagrams as time machines

Ruth Ewan: We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be, 2011

Marq Smith, editor of the Journal of Visual Culture, asked me to contribute to a symposium connected with the exhibition he has curated, How to Construct a Time Machine, and I offered this: 

Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg described his 16.5 metre diagram in 1753 as "a moving, living tableau, through which pass in review all the ages of the world ... where the rise and fall of Empires are acted out in visible form." Pictorial images of past times seem the most obvious way for us to "travel" in time, evoking the visual characteristics of historical ages. But when the modern timeline was invented in the eighteenth century, diagrams too were promoted as a means to situate ourselves in the past. Images of travel, exploration and international trade were eagerly co-opted as images of historical inquiry.

It allows me to rethink some of the metaphors of geography and cartography, discussed here, as metaphors of travel. Travel around the globe – with exploration, trade and the building of a comprehensive world view in mind – becomes travel through time.  

The Symposium: 

How to Construct a Time Machine 

Tuesday 17 March / 1.30-6pm 

6 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE 

The events are organised by curators Marquard Smith, Nina Trivedi and Simon Wright.  With contributions from James Auger (RCA, on robots), Stephen Boyd Davis (RCA, on timelines), Sonya Dyer (Artist, on the future), Katharine Fry(Goldsmiths, on the constant instant), Peter Osborne (Kingston), and Nina Trivedi (RCA, on deep time)

I was glad to see Ruth Ewan (image above), who contributes to the exhibition, echoing the decimal clock of the French Revolution (below).

From Wikipedia: French Republican Calendar