Othering Time
Why Your Watch Can't Measure a Forest's Pulse
How scientists, artists, and designers are rewiring our perception of time to hear nature's forgotten rhythms
Contents
Introduction: The Tyranny of Human Time
We live by the beat of human-made time—clocks, calendars, and deadlines. Yet beneath this artificial pulse, Earth's inhabitants dance to rhythms spanning microseconds to millennia: bacterial generations in minutes, forest growth in centuries, geological shifts in eons. This "temporal othering"—ignoring non-human timescales—fuels ecological crises. But pioneering work in augmented reality, bioart, and speculative design is helping us attune to these alien tempos, revealing how time shapes more-than-human worlds 1 2 .
Rethinking Time: From Chronos to Kairos
Timescapes replace clocks as ecological frameworks:
Immediate experiences (e.g., a mayfly's 24-hour life)
Slow, collective rhythms (e.g., mycelial networks regenerating after wildfires) 2
These scales clash with industrial time. Bioartist Melanie Sarantou's wool tapestry, co-created with sunflower seedlings, required 18 months of growth—a timescale dictated by the plants, not human schedules 2 .
Sympoiesis (making-with) reframes creativity as collaboration across species. As researcher Vella notes: "Curating becomes dialogue when artists surrender authorship to bacterial luminescence or reindeer blood's pigment properties" .
The Experiment: Seeing Time Through Augmented Reality
Methodology: Layering Temporal Realities
A 2025 pilot study used AR headsets to visualize "multiple temporalities" in Oslo's urban forests. Participants navigated while seeing:
Real-time biodata
Insect movements amplified as glowing trails
Accelerated decomposition
Fungi digesting logs over 40 days compressed to 4 minutes
Geological deep time
Projected rock formations from 10,000 BCE to 2200 CE 1
| Temporality Type | Human Timescale Equivalent | Non-Human Actor |
|---|---|---|
| Micro-time | 1 second → 1 minute | Bacteria |
| Growth time | 1 day → 10 seconds | Mycelium |
| Deep time | 1,000 years → 5 minutes | Geological strata |
Results: Rewiring Perception
87% of participants reported "profound shifts" in ecological awareness. One noted: "Watching stones 'flow' like water made me realize mountains aren't static—they're slow rivers." Physiological sensors showed decreased heart rates when observing slow-time layers, suggesting somatic attunement to non-human rhythms 1 .
| Attunement Metric | Pre-AR (%) | Post-AR (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Felt "connected" to non-human time | 22 | 79 |
| Could define "deep time" | 11 | 68 |
| Expressed ethical concern for non-humans | 37 | 91 |
Bioart's Temporal Strategies: When Bacteria Become Clocks
Artists deploy living media to materialize alien timescales:
In Saeki's Digital Screen Printing, bacterial colonies dictate image emergence over days—their growth rate becoming the "ink timer" 2
Pietarinen's artworks use blood's oxidation clock; colors shift from crimson to rust as hemoglobin reacts with air across weeks 2
These works act as biological interfaces, translating microbial or chemical tempos into human-sensory experiences.
Curating Temporality: Museums as Time-Bending Spaces
Forward-thinking institutions employ three strategies:
Exhibits where fictional future species (e.g., AI-generated corals) critique present extinction rates
Curator Ingrid Vranken's Rooted Hauntology Lab uses decaying plant matter to manifest "ghost time"—the persistence of memory in ecosystems
POLIN Museum's 12-principle framework layers geological, cultural, and ecological timelines in one installation
| Strategy | Timescale Accessed | Key Example |
|---|---|---|
| Parafiction | Future speculative | AI-generated extinct species |
| Sympoietic collaboration | Growth/decay cycles | Reindeer blood paintings |
| Multi-sensory immersion | Micro to deep time | AR forest temporal overlays 1 |
Ethical Dimensions: Who Controls Time?
Attuning to non-human time demands radical reciprocity:
Indigenous ontologies, as seen in Lima's MASM museum, frame time as cyclical co-becoming rather than linear progress 2
Projects using reindeer blood honor animals through Sami rituals, rejecting extractive "harvesting" of temporalities 2
As researcher Miettinen argues: "We must ask: Are we listening to non-human time, or just appropriating its aesthetics?" 2
The Scientist's Toolkit: Instruments for Temporal Attunement
| Tool | Function | Example Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| AR Speculative Prototyping | Overlays alternative temporalities onto physical spaces | Visualizing forest decay/regeneration cycles 1 |
| Bioart Media | Uses living organisms as temporal sensors | Bacterial canvases revealing growth rates 2 |
| Temporal Mapping Software | Visualizes layered timescales (micro to deep time) | Mapping coral bleaching across decades 2 |
| More-than-Human Toolkits | Frameworks for cross-species collaboration | td-net's co-design methods for temporal projects 3 |
| Field Recording Gear | Captures infra/ultrasonic rhythms | Documenting tree root communication frequencies |
Conclusion: Time as a Shared Habitat
Attuning to non-human temporalities isn't about romanticizing "nature's pace." It's recognizing that time, like air or water, is a shared habitat. As AR experiments and bioart show, dissolving the illusion of human-time supremacy could be key to survival. The challenge now? To build what artist Raphael Vella calls "curatorial clocks"—institutions, technologies, and rituals that honor time's polyphony . After all, a forest doesn't need our schedules. But we desperately need its rhythms.
Glossary
- More-than-Human
- Worlds encompassing animals, plants, microbes, and geophysical forces
- Sympoiesis
- Co-creative making across species boundaries
- Timescape
- Temporality experienced within a specific ecological/cultural context