Today, because I needed an interactive animated avatar for our latest social VR research, I decided to repurpose a character I had created years ago. That was back when I first started programming for the Web in Java.
As soon as I saw the newly reconstituted character (now translated into Javascript), I realized that I had created the original exactly twenty years ago. Strangely, it did not feel at all as though twenty years had passed. In fact, it felt like just a moment.
Looking at the character, and the code I had written to model and animate it, my mind slipped back to the exact moment of first creation, and into the exact thoughts I had had in that moment. The feeling was as though I had put down my tools for just a second, and then picked them right up again after a brief pause.
I wonder whether there is a separate category of time, which might be called “artistic time”. In the world around us, years might elapse, nations may rise and fall, and entire generation of children can be born and grow up to become young women and men.
But when we are in artistic time, all of those things can feel like a distant dream. For within that creative place inside us, we know that it was all just a moment.
I had a similar experience with a Macintosh app I wrote nearly 30 years ago to draw chaotic patterns. Thanks to the magic of emulation, I was able to bring up a window on a modern PC to fool my old program into running on modern hardware. Under emulation it runs orders of magnitude faster than it did 30 years ago. Patterns I waited a minute or so for then now form in the blink of an eye.
Ironically, while the compiled binary lives on, the source code is dead. The tools to compile it no longer exist (the company selling it having long gone under). Even the C language it was written in changed out from under it.
[Speaking of emulation…the Internet Archive created a buzz a while back by making all the old PC games of the 90’s available in one click via browser emulation. Just in time for all the kids who played them to re-live their childhoods.]
It is similar in concept to the Ancient Greek description of time as Chronos vs Kaïros, where Chronos represents the sequential perception of events and Kaïros more so the gestalt of it, events linked through time on their own space.
Kaïros is also dubbed “the right moment” to do things, and perhaps it is in the nature of creation to expose itself to us when we lost touch of time, let Chronos slip away for something else to emerge.