William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison

Our grasp of time continues to change, in wrenching ways. This is an exploration of these shifts and struggles, across drawing and text, music and movement, film and concepts. In the late nineteenth century, time was coordinated: towns, cities, whole countries lost their “own” time as signals synchronized clocks. When Albert Einstein introduced his radical idea undermining the notion of a “universally audible tick-tock” in favor of times not time, he found resistance furious; and in our own era, time is again in tumult—time crossed with information, challenged at the horizon of black holes, even, among many string theorists, rendered a mere illusion. In a congenial long-term collaboration, Peter L. Galison, historian, author, filmmaker, and Professor of the History of Science and Physics at Harvard University and South African artist William Kentridge are researching such notions in The Refusal of Time, a project for dOCUMENTA (13) into which this notebook offers first insights.