“What is time? If no one asks me about it, I know; if I want to explain it to the one who asks, I don’t know.”
-[Fabian quoting Confessions, Book XI in his book, Time and the other]

 How do we experience time? What do we understand from time? The subject has been explored widely by philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and archaeologists through various theories, such as experience of the flow of time and how different cultures understand time through models such as cyclicity and linearity 4, or exploring scales of time within a distinctly historical analytical framework 5, or through affects and emotions of humans such as boredom, anxiety, numbness. Experiencing time through materiality and how materials intervene with time is seldom explored 13.

To expound on that, let us start with the obvious question, how does one understand the passage of time in a literal sense? Through the framework of a clock. The interaction of the spring in a clock and its rhythmic repetitive process, the swing of a pendulum, the vibration of quartz, or atomic particles define time. The material qualities and the inherent nature of these materials, whether by themselves or through interaction with other materials, define the understanding of passage of time. And what happens when one is deprived of this framework? As experiments of people living in isolation chambers or deep caves show, when other clues are taken away, humans understand time through the yardstick of their own bodily rhythms. Even outside the standard framework of understanding time, materials, their materiality, and the greater systems developed from the materials, define time. The reflections of light through the window, the growth of trees, the battery life in a phone, the diffusion of a dying bulb, the level of ink in a pen, the flattening taste of a carbonated drink, the condensing water droplets on a cold glass of water, or the obvious burning candle, they all signify passage of some kind of experiential time that may or may not align with clock time.

But is time measurement defined by experiential qualities of a material or through repetitions, rhythms and observable temporal patterns? The history of both chronometry in general and absolute dating methods in archaeology is all about the search for observable physical processes regular enough to measure the passing of time by: in archaeology this includes not only radioactive decay (as in radiocarbon and uranium/thorium dating) but the accumulation of subatomic particles (optically stimulated luminescence dating, or thermoluminescence), and even the seasonal growth of trees (dendrochronology)13.

While the passage of time can be experienced through repeated rhythms or an isolated event, time is always an attribute of materials, and materials are always experienced temporally.

And even though it seems obvious to see that material processes and attributes are temporal, material culture theorists state (and not necessarily agree with) that it is a common impression that things are temporally neutral, that they are fitted into time entirely by social use and convention 13. Temporality as a material quality has been discussed only by Ingold 6. Ingold argues that materials are always in flux, never free from time and change. And so are humans. The intrigue here is not in the temporality of materiality and its nature of flux, but in the homeostasis between the various temporal objects and systems with each other and with the humans. Materials are often seen as cultural and social discourses based on their physical attributes. What are the materials when devoid of external human interaction? A rock will erode at its own pace, and a tree will grow and fall as its life permits, but humans have a tendency to align the temporalities of materials and self as needed. Humans speed up or slow down the time for the materials. We preserve and deteriorate materials as needed for our time. The point is that it is not the absolute fact of temporal change which is important, but the temporality which emerges from an object’s material qualities as they afford possibilities of use, inhabitation, and understanding to the subject 13.

This further raises the question of what qualities contribute to the temporal experience? An iron rod’s deteriorating color is also a significance of passage of time through the experience of rust or decay, as well as its breaking from that rust and subsequently resulting in a change of form regardless of the color change is equally a signifier of time passage. Moreover, its use from being stored in a warehouse, to transport to a construction site, to being embedded in some building structure, also signifies experiencing temporal shift. Can any and all change be considered as a measurement of time? Each transition in material is experienced differently so what defines which change signifies a passage of time better than the other? Who has the agency to define this hierarchy? Is it the material, or the one experiencing time through the materials?

And what even is a material? Is it just the haptic forms around us that we conventionally understand to be materials? Are sound and light materials? The Oxford definition of material is ‘the matter from which a thing is or can be made’. We can make words and languages from sound, and similarly shapes from light and shadows. Sound travels spatially, has a direction, a nature. So does light. And doesn’t the entire notion of space-time revolve around the speed of light? How do we experience time through materials such as light and sound? These materials are frequently experienced spatially and their interaction with different mediums of travel are directly associated with time. Sound travels differently through water than through air. Light bends through different mediums and can physically fragment itself trying to travel through different speeds (rainbow through a prism). Similarly, speech derived from sound can convey the exact same message faster or slower based on a language or speed of delivery. It also affects spatial reach of the same message depending on how loud or low the volume is. What happens when one is subjected to a varying nature of these materials of sound or light? How is time experienced at the intersection of multiples of these diversely changing materials (for instance, when different sources of the same sound are placed at different distances and/or on different volumes)?

From pondering over temporalities of materials that are understood to be so in the conventional sense, to thinking about temporalities of materials sound and light, what equation can come out of a hybrid outcome of both of these notions of materials? How does one experience time through virtual and digital materials? While affinity, aversion, or any other affect towards physical materials is associated with various sentiments such as nostalgia, comfort, familiarity, discomfort, pain, and countless others, how do digital or virtual materials evoke feelings? The making processes certainly contribute to evoking the emotions. The more the time is spent in creating something, the more valuable it often seems. What does that mean for digital materials? And is that truly the case? Perhaps the narration is equally significant. One might find a quickly made t-shirt more significant because their best friend has the same one, than a hand knitted sweater from an artisan who is emotionally a distant stranger. The digital and virtual world is notorious for quick copies, whether it is social media reposts or copy-paste of a file on a computer. How does this instant result affect our affinity towards digital materials? Are our short attention spans pushing us towards instant gratification from immediate outcomes or is the overstimulation adversely affecting our relationship with digital materials?

So far, the notion of materials and materiality is explored as other, separate from the 'self'. The ponderings over experiencing time through materials, their interactions, and their change has been explored as an external force. But what happens to the experience when the line between us and materials is blurred? How is the experience when we ourselves are the materials? The obvious mention of a human life takes one to the idea of birth, growth, life, decay, and death. While we certainly experience our longest temporal experience as that of life, our capacity to create memories and speculate takes us outside the realm of earth time, clock time, or physical time. We live parallel lives in different temporal states when we remember or when we speculate. The material- our biological system- creates new time. It is a time that is shared but personal. Do the conventional materials such as metal, wood, or stone; the unconventional materials such as light and sound; or the digital materials such as images and texts also create multiple parallel times?

How does time exist outside of the material processes? For a soap bubble, for instance, time is experienced through the anticipation of the bubble, making of the bubble, existence of the bubble, and bursting of the bubble. We can also say, perhaps, it extends before and after this frame, existing along the preparation of the raw-materials for making the bubble, and exists after the bubble is burst through the droplets and the sudden absence of it. But what happens to the temporality of that bubble outside of this cycle? And similarly, what happens to any temporal presence and existence outside of its association with the material? Can material time die? Is material time transient or perpetual? Or similar to laws of thermodynamics, does material time simply transform from one material to another, and is not really created or destroyed? In case of a soap bubble, are the material times of the water, soap, and bubble separate or amalgamated?

Our interactions are certainly subjected to and as a result of an interlacement of countless material temporalities. How often is there a conflict in this interlacement? What happens within a temporal conflict? Is our tendency to align material temporalities parallel to our own an attempt at this conflict resolution? While we certainly have the power, and exhibit it as well, to control material time to a certain extent, how often does the material temporalities shape our temporalities?

“The history of things is about material presences which are far more tangible than the ghostly evocations of civil history.”
-[George Kubler in ‘The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things’]

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