Introduction

Introduction Shepherd Steiner Mosaic 55.1 is the first of two issues that present the proceedings of an online conference titled Relative Time/Little Time. Working collaboratively with the Dutch artists Bik Van der Pol, the project sought to promote a multinational and multidisciplinary forum that leaned into far more public and far more urgent political questions than the journal had traditionally broached. The precise subject of inquiry was the deep pool of experience that was emerging in and around the question of time in the two-year period during which the world was gripped by pandemic. The different granularities of time—its elasticity, its shortening as well as its after-effects, its links to economy, ecology, geological history, colonialism, the abbreviated horizon it finds in the climate crisis—were to mark an important transition for Mosaic. The reorientation was a question of the timeliness of academic work, and the positioning of that work in a way that is more forthrightly imbricated in the issues that dominate public discourse and impact everyday life. With a particular emphasis on our ever-loosening grip on futurity and the untimeliness of solutions, the conference, which took place between November 2021 and April 2022, turned on a range of high-profile scholarly contributions, collaborations, interventions by artists, work in the field by activists, and the perspectives of emerging scholars. [End Page v] The acutely political work of Bik Van der Pol was crucial for galvanizing all of this. Their projects typically hinge on archival politics, collaboration, and activating situations, and are always driven to push discourse into shaping the public sphere. In late 2020 Mosaic invited them to investigate the gaps and blindnesses that were constitutive of the journal as an institution and archive. The archival issue that resulted (see Mosaic 54.3) aimed to understand the limits, logic, and dynamics of the Mosaic archive, to identify the slow creep of ideological processes, which leave their trace over time, and finally, to hasten the progress of select threads of the journal's discursive history. The politico-aesthetic edge that was the initial result of our collaboration sharpens and comes to a focus here in issues 55.1 and 55.2. This is especially clear from the interdisciplinary nature of the essays presented here, the often collaborative working methods instanced, and the level playing field accorded to artists, critical thinkers, and academics. The original idea for Relative Time/Little Time came into shape as a focus on the different granularities of time beginning in 1989, with the marked acceleration of capital, and ending in 2020, when the world came to a halt under the influence of the pandemic. This trajectory and its differing velocities—what we experienced especially as the sputtering stops and starts of quarantine and vaccine—gave rise to a number of questions that keyed time to the vicissitudes of economy and its temporal technologies as much as the chronotypes of a simpler life apparently bordering on nature. At no time in recent memory have so many so viscerally felt the deceleration of working life and conversely been caught up in the increasingly frenetic pace of world events. The social bond never felt so fragile and seemed so precious. Life as we knew it became fundamentally unglued, and yet if the degree of separation between people, the environment, and the inhuman were pushed to a breaking point—for the most part, aggressively pixelated and lived more than ever in screen-light—our relational ties with others, nature, and the world of things also tightened in unexpected ways. Ultimately, the way Relative Time/Little Time opens up the granularity of time to questions of lifedeath links this altogether new existential crisis in Western democracies to the "nocturnal face" of colonialism, probes the prosthetic extensions of temporal life through technology, thinks time geologically as a function of resource extraction at sites of Indigenous life, and, finally, reveals a range of functional relationships between time and mobility, ecology, neurodiversity, geo-political spaces, the war-economy, sleep, social justice, philosophy, media theory, sociology, photography, and affect theory. But none of this would be so perspicacious without the essays collected here from our contributors. [End Page vi...

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