“Fabricating an Illusion” 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
Last Thursday I went up the street to have coffee with a friend. We had visited this café a number of times before the pandemic. Both of us are vaccinated, and sat at a table far enough away from others, so no need to wear masks. It was enjoyable hanging out like this, after about fourteen months of being by myself, other than to shop for food. Initially, having coffee with my friend had a newness in feeling. But after a bit of time had elapsed, I began to feel a bit like I had been doing this same thing a week or two earlier. This strange collapse of time I experienced has a lot to do with my most recent painting. This painting is my investigation into how I, and I suspect many others perceive time, how previous months or decades of my life can collapse into a shorter time frame in an instant.
Those of my generation, can remember exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when hearing the news of John Kennedy’s assassination. In a similar way as above, I can go back to that afternoon in 1963, collapsing fifty-eight years of events, and be there again. It’s strangely more than just memory, or so I feel.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza.[1] Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, firing in ambush from a nearby building. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally recovered.
My painting includes frame 313 of the Abraham Zapruder film. the frame which shows Kennedy being shot in the head, while his wife Jacqueline turns fully towards him. Zapruder’s film, taken with the intent of have a wonderful memory of the Kennedy’s visit, was not shown to the public until 1975, although a few tasteful frames were reproduced in Life magazine in December of 1963.
And now for a taste of the real stuff!
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness.
Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”By Maria PopovaIn Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as The Life of the Mind (public library) — the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:
Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego — summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s — is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls — and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them — does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane (2018)
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.
Artem Boytsov
“Time is not an illusion. It is no more illusory than space is.
But it is also true, that you can never experience time directly. Whether you think of the past, or you think of the future, neither actually exist - these are just thoughts happening at the present moment. Notice that the same can be said about space - you perceive space, but you are always right here. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. You can move in space and you’re constantly moving in time.
You could also look at the universe as one indivisible space-time object, and from that perspective, both past and future already exist, and your present moment and position is a dot moving along your individual trajectory. Saying that both past and future already exist and predetermined and saying neither exist are different ways of saying the same thing.
As far as spirituality is concerned, things get somewhat more complicated. The process of spiritual enlightenment is basically the process of moving towards imperceptibility of time. That’s why “time doesn’t exist” is such a well known spiritual cliché.”
Last Thursday I went up the street to have coffee with a friend. We had visited this café a number of times before the pandemic. Both of us are vaccinated, and sat at a table far enough away from others, so no need to wear masks. It was enjoyable hanging out like this, after about fourteen months of being by myself, other than to shop for food. Initially, having coffee with my friend had a newness in feeling. But after a bit of time had elapsed, I began to feel a bit like I had been doing this same thing a week or two earlier. This strange collapse of time I experienced has a lot to do with my most recent painting. This painting is my investigation into how I, and I suspect many others perceive time, how previous months or decades of my life can collapse into a shorter time frame in an instant.
Those of my generation, can remember exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when hearing the news of John Kennedy’s assassination. In a similar way as above, I can go back to that afternoon in 1963, collapsing fifty-eight years of events, and be there again. It’s strangely more than just memory, or so I feel.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza.[1] Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, firing in ambush from a nearby building. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally recovered.
My painting includes frame 313 of the Abraham Zapruder film. the frame which shows Kennedy being shot in the head, while his wife Jacqueline turns fully towards him. Zapruder’s film, taken with the intent of have a wonderful memory of the Kennedy’s visit, was not shown to the public until 1975, although a few tasteful frames were reproduced in Life magazine in December of 1963.
And now for a taste of the real stuff!
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness.
Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”By Maria PopovaIn Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as The Life of the Mind (public library) — the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:
Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego — summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s — is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls — and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them — does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane (2018)
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.
Artem Boytsov
“Time is not an illusion. It is no more illusory than space is.
But it is also true, that you can never experience time directly. Whether you think of the past, or you think of the future, neither actually exist - these are just thoughts happening at the present moment. Notice that the same can be said about space - you perceive space, but you are always right here. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. You can move in space and you’re constantly moving in time.
You could also look at the universe as one indivisible space-time object, and from that perspective, both past and future already exist, and your present moment and position is a dot moving along your individual trajectory. Saying that both past and future already exist and predetermined and saying neither exist are different ways of saying the same thing.
As far as spirituality is concerned, things get somewhat more complicated. The process of spiritual enlightenment is basically the process of moving towards imperceptibility of time. That’s why “time doesn’t exist” is such a well known spiritual cliché.”
