dialogue between
Kodwo & Morton & Wiener

Term paper
DIGITAL MEDIA NOW:
Mapping contemporary conditions

Viacheslav Romanov
Hochshule für Künste Bremen
Digital Media M.A.
2021

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Abstract

This paper explores the interpretation of time and space in the works and interviews of Timothy Morton and Kodwo Eshun, as well as researchers of the topic of environmental criticism, Afrofuturism, and Sonic fiction, by simulating fictitious dialogue in an imaginary environment, with these authors and Oswald Wiener as moderator. The search for interconnections in their approaches draws attention to the importance of the role of language, logic and politics in shaping the perception of time and space. They are changeable in the direction from a monopolistic future and linear time to a multiple futurality free from the predominance of constructions of appropriation and restriction of access. Change arises where language is freed from hierarchy and singular structure - where concepts and habitual systems of knowledge collide, mix, disintegrate, and especially where music and rhythm act as a language of corporeality, beyond the existing relations of power and subordination.

You can collapse all of these things;

science fiction and music, they're the same

(Kodwo, 1998: 175)

It’s a pure invention, a fiction, but nevertheless it works.

(Wiener in Dany, 2015)

Contents

Here and Now
Language
Human&Non-Human
Collapse
Introduction
References

Philosophers should never be allowed on the dance floor. Or maybe they should only be allowed on dance floors because that’s where their intellect might become confused enough to say something of significance

(Morton, 2017: 119).

Das reden war so geworden als ob ich nur in zitaten redete, aber es klang gut

(Wiener in Morgenroth, n.d.)

Here and Now

Oswald Wiener (OW) meets Kodwo Eshun (KE) of The Otholith Group and Timothy Morton (TM) of Rice University on a rave in an abandoned industrial zone to discuss their views on the nature of time and matter.

OW. Greetings, Kodwo and Timothy. We find ourselves here and now in the realm of the hardly imaginable. I realize that our meeting has, at first glance, nothing to do with what is called reality, but the question of its existence pertains, among other things, to the topic of our conversation. In addition to our readiness to discuss the logic of Western philosophical thought, the capitalist and anthropocentric order, we are united by the proximity of historical segments and contexts, and, as a consequence, by the common linguistic device that is available without unnecessary conventions. It is difficult to talk about the inevitability of this meeting, but I would nevertheless like to know what, in your opinion, is the relevance of today's discussion?

TM. Nice to meet you, Oswald and Kodwo. Experiencing myself as a sensual object additionally illustrate the spectral quality, the thin line between the real and unreal state of our situation. Anxiety in a globalized world circulates more and more with the desire to answer all questions and solve all problems in the manner that is characteristic of humankind - through growth. The relentless pursuit of relentless life just is death and extermination (2017: 37-38). Attempts to place on a temporal or spatial scale, to establish a link between cause and effect of ecological and humanitarian crises, extinctions, military conflicts fail because they are virtually impossible to describe or present as a limited number of elements and manifestations. The smoothly functioning human world is now malfunctioning precisely because of this gap between our world, with its anthropocentric access modes, and actual reality (2017: 53).

OW. While I have no doubt that humanity will find a way to exterminate itself sooner or later (Steuber, 2019), does the word "now" have any specific meaning?

TM. Absolutely. I am referring to the contemporary "human world," woven into a neoliberal model tied to domination and separation, which is precisely in the present historical moment not answering the questions raised. But at the same time I am also talking about the Anthropocene era, a much broader temporal category, "within" which, we can find ourselves (2015: 76). Its objective content is a gigantic die-off of lifeforms, dragged into the agrilogistics program that continues to run at the present moment. (2017: 53). The presence of multiple timelines and non-linearity makes it possible to speak of a crisis that is occurring precisely "now." However, how the present or presence can be imagined is a separate question.

OW. Obviously, this brings us back to the more general question of the nature of time and timelines. What do you think about this, Kodwo?

KE. Good evening, Oswald and Timothy. I believe the place and time of our meeting are perfect for illustrating the heterogeneity and multiplicity of timescales. The concrete hulk of an abandoned hangar, surrounded by rocky hills and filled with light and people, the erected temporal structure, the successive electronic compositions and the event that unites this aggregate - collide in its combination of geological, technological and human times. The boundaries of this division are losing clarity. Man as a species has achieved a previously uncharacteristic agency felt in different layers of the Earth. (Ross, 2015: 27). And observing the traces of catastrophes and destruction, we perceive the nature of these phenomena - they make the past very present (Ross, 2015: 22). In this vein, I would characterize time as the non-teleological procession of change and development (Rosales, 2017).

TM. In my opinion, this case illustrates the nowness we share as a dynamic relationship between the past and the future, and this region can't be tied to a specific timescale. Time itself is not a line of reified atomic now-points. It is also not a liquid continuum in which objects are floating, but it emanates from them: past and future are artifacts of the structure of entities as such and are to be found nowhere outside them. The rocky hill we are on is a map of everything that happened to the hill: geological processes, biological intervention, industrial expansion, entropy, a one-night rave-squatting. It constitutes its appearance, its form - the past. And there's no way to point at some particular moment where the past is left behind, giving a start for this exact appearance (2015: 57-58)

OW. But what about the future in this sense? What is the quality of it and why there are so many efforts to predict, algorithmize technologically with different success? While more and more significant innovations are being stuck in bureaucracy or self-inflicted, some simulation techniques, like weather forecasting, have become successful (Dany, 2015).

TM. Well, I would say that the future remains unpredictable. An algorithm (and the weather prediction is certainly an algorithm) is more like an automated past, as it is more connected to the appearance: a snapshot of a past series of modes, like a musical score. We may know the playlist of today's main scene, moreover, we can observe the prediction of our musical taste online for a small fee, but each mode is still representing a past state of human style (2017: 19-20). I consider the future as the essence of the thing, its being and, also, an abyss. What may go right or wrong tonight? Measurable future depends on uncountable futurality, no matter how we access the party - dancing, leaving, discussing it - it slips away like a liquid. (2017: 56-67)

KE. In some sense, choosing how to deal with the future is less like forecasting and more like opening space for the relation between the alternative futures that the “now" makes potential (Rosales, 2017). It offers dramatically fantastic opportunities to travel at the speed of thought, being open for alternative interpretations and improvisation practices (1998: -015). In a way how Oswald described it in his well-known old work, allowing improvisation can help to see conventions, routines, clichés, and established things, that is, everything that must otherwise be concealed by an effort of refinement (Morgenroth, n.d.). I believe that freeing the present of monopoly determination is a way to unchain these practices.

OW. That means, you agree that, in Harman's words, time is the dynamic of change and sameness, a derivative from the tension between objects and their sensitive qualities, where different objects of greater or lesser durability are being withdrawn (Kleinherenbrink, 2019).

KE. To some extent. As if the world is a reality studio where all the tapes run all the time (1998: 145), as individually attenuated sound sources pulsate each to their own rhythm: subwoofers distributed throughout the hangar, snares echoing off surfaces, the hum of vibrating metal roof, the scattered shouts and whistles of a dancing crowd. Rave is a lab where the nervous systems assemble themselves, the matrices of the Futurhythmachinic Discontinuum (1998: -001). And electronic music is collapsing the polarization between myths and technologies.

TM. And this lab, definitely, have a spectral strangeness: how many dancers do I have to remove for this rave not to be a rave? One - surely not. Two - still a rave. Using the same logic, I come to one dancer left and may conclude, wrongly, that there is no rave. It's strictly impossible to think ecological reality via a metaphysics of presence, namely, a belief that to be a thing, you have to be constantly present (2017: 67). Especially in our case.

Fig. 1. The illustration of the spectrality
of language in relation to rave
photo: V.Romanov

Language

TM. “Mass party with loud, fast electronic music and often psychedelic drugs” - looks like the dictionary definitions, in their attempt to highlight the distinctive features are draining spectral qualities of the objects. Seven centuries ago, the same combination of sounds, for some reason was much more inclusive: “To dream; wander here and there, prowl; behave madly, be crazy”. In a much more playful manner, it conveys not only the state of happy people on the dancefloor but also the impossibility to grab the rave as a whole with some analytical tweezers and detach the shadow of it. This etymological resonance includes even "talking about (something or someone) enthusiastically or immoderately" (www.etymonline.com, n.d.) - so, the “dreaming” of rave in the documented history of language consists of futural qualities as well as of images of the past due to their infinite interpretations (2017: 100).

OW. That’s an interesting opinion. However, the etymology in this way resonates very much with the habit of defining everything. Language gives us a provisional analysis of reality. if there is no further corrective for it, the whole world would hold decisively onto this analysis as a definitive one. but the only correctives lie in all those other languages that have achieved, through eons of independent development, totally different, though equally logical and equally provisional analyses (Wiener, Miller, 1999).

KE. But the textual and verbal language, with its flexibility, which we use so responsibly, remains a very limited instrument for temporal analyses. First of all, as long as it remains imprisoned in the framework of media modernity and is not bombarded by unreal and unacceptable phenomena, it serves as a means of self-reproduction of the security info field, where the capitalistic catastrophe of Fukushima or BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill are presented as a local humanitarian rather than a capitalist disaster (Ross, 2015: 25). The monopolization of the definition of the future cuts these infinite alternatives and repeats the socio-political power relations of our present (Rosales, 2017). The suspiciousness of Modernity and its apparatus is entrenched in eternity, as the geometrical considerations of time institutionalize the future derived from slavery, imperialism and commodification of people (2003). And, at the same moment, there are no such words in a language of hierarchy that could reproduce one hundred thousand years of the decay of nuclear waste in a bunker, it’s even out of focus. (Ross, 2015: 26)

TM. Making an accent on ubiquitous and elusive capitalist economics reveals it as an anthropocentric discourse unable to factor in the things so much required by ecological thought and politics: unfamiliar timescales and nonhuman beings (2017: 12). It doesn’t allow the possibility of many futures, deriving from the mutual determination of the past and present, because it serves to a single one (Rosales, 2017).

OW. But an instrumental efficiency of this, likely, misleading concept lies in this magical ability to control others through language – the fact that an opinion can be brought into existence by vibrations in the air. The fact that there’s really just this bridge of language between my idea and what I’m trying to induce in another person’s head (Wiener, Miller, 1999).

EK. Wait, but to be a language does not necessarily mean to be a top-down language of media or science, which drains the blood of life and leaves everything vivisected. (1998: 177) A change of perception is impossible without a change of language. In this change, the academic mind police, journalistic codes and the postmodern Zeitgeist should be ignored. Concepts can freely and very precisely be pushed, stretched, reversed, blurred, recombined, negated, mutated. Every conceptual apparatus is engaged, so there is nothing forbidden in combining different systems of knowledge, even if it reveals itself as violent (2003). Moreover, we must do violence to our conventional forms of cognition in order to sinew the order of philosophical, aesthetic, and political practice to an actualized overcoming of what rendered modernity forever suspect (Rosales, 2017). Oswald, you talked about vibrations spreading in the air: we can also relate to them as a language of rhythm, directly interacting with physicality. It allows us to reach a new level of understanding, an understanding in which even the normal language of feeling can be shattered and reassembled. And my point is, music is a physical signalling language, the psychedelia which is able to the reworking of the temporal lexicon.

TM. So you see music as a kind of intertext, consisting of systematic quotations with which you can artistically reshape chronology and introduce a necessary amount of fiction into history?

EK. Exactly! What is meaningful is that I focus on music that is free of top-down interrelations. The key in communication is to engineer a sensory alteration, something which disturbs perception - a means of sending out a signal to perceive (1998: 189). It’s not so important what scene it is - House, Trance, Breakbeat, Jazz - the language of sensory emotions is in the rhythmic psychedelia which music provides. And it’s much more capable to convey complex and unspeakable spatial and temporal meanings. I understand that mainstream media tends to hierarchize the body, as a “futureshock absorber”: proper or true music, traditional and inherited rules of melody over harmony, beats over rhythm, and so on (1998: 183). But dance music is a headmusic and it’s kinaesthetic at the same time. It can hardly be clothed in the costume of conventional musical theory - it uses an entirely different signalling system, addressing its impulses on a bodily level. Listen as the signals flow scattered on the dancefloor, they come to skin and the skin seizes control of all the sensory channels, they become open and supercharged - and each dancer triggered by the bass drop becomes a medium transmitting and receiving sensory current (1998: 099). And this breakbeat science originated in grasping concepts, hallucinations, translating, mixing and observing them, is a working method to anticipate and fastforward different explorations into new fields of perceptions. They are always there, but their strength lies in that they don't exist in traditional mainstream terms (1998: 186).

OW. In your speech, you pay a lot of attention to science - or more precisely, to its "dehierarchised” alternative. Together with the sensorial language it becomes a conductor of new meaning, this seems interesting, given that conventional science and technology tend to be strictly hierarchical and from a certain point begin to work as a self-stabilizer. At a time when the contradictions are no longer manageable and then leap into a qualitatively new state, another way of conceiving the world is imminent, the computer would function as a means of prolonging the old, existing state of affairs (Wiener, Miller, 1999). To overthrow the infallibility of that kind of science it is enough to understand that the scientists needn’t necessarily be barbarians themselves, they need only shut their eyes or want to live nice lives or have a voice within the structures of power (Dany, 2015).

EK. Yes, in music, and in the way science is used in music as a science of sensory engineering, it's never been like that. When a musical composition is named Sunspots, Wrinkles in Time, or Timeless, these are the points where the laws of gravity and the laws of time and space collapse (1998: 177).

TM. Well, this something about language is in a way showing us something about how meaning is also spectral (2017: 79).

Fig. 2. Visualization of the audio analysis of the composition ‘Timeless” by Goldie (Price, 1995) using the Texture 3d and Time Machine operators of the TouchDesigner environment. Red lines represent kicks, green lines - snares, bending of a line reflects the intensity of middle frequencies, playing during the composition. Each frame corresponds to a specific moment and also stores data of previously played moments. Linear time representation.

Human&Non-Human

OW. So, your idea is that by setting us free of anthropocentric linguistics, or, better to say, providing us with simultaneous differently scaled viewpoints, music and its physicality enables for us the observation at Earth magnitude?

TM. In a way. Take such binary distinctions as here versus there, person versus thing, individual versus group, conscious versus unconscious, sentient versus non-sentient, life versus non-life, and even existence versus nonexistence. At Earth magnitude, they don’t matter anymore. Or better, they cease to be thin and rigid and matter in amazingly different ways. As the development of biological knowledge raised the problem of the life-nonlife boundary, ecological age does the same with sentience, consciousness and human-nonhuman altogether. The ideas like the world and here begin to look not like bit abstract concepts, but rather small, localised, and human-flavoured. Not in the sense of denying the existence of the concept of place, but in melting of the very idea that space is the real one, because it’s just abstract extension, based on an anthropocentric viewpoint, in all sorts of ways. Euclidean space is really a suitable human-scale way to describe motion (2015: 78).

KE. The decentering of the human sense and reversing its perspective is crucial: it allows us to perceive the material, such as liquid crystals, Atlantic Ocean, or radiation as having agency. (Ross, 2015: 21) And the scale and manifestations of such agencies sometimes have not so much to do with those that are conventional.
OW. So, you are pointing out the role of human and non-human distinction as a very limited concept. And what, in your opinion, disintegrates boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture, mind and body, inside and outside?

KE. I would like to emphasize the special role of technology here. As Timothy mentioned just now, knowledge allows shifting the viewpoint. The discovery of X-rays raised the artistic curiosity of making radiation tangible. Geiger counter and its rhythmical sound indications are designed to understand the level of radiation. At the same time, in some way, birds and animals, having tactile and aural senses far more sensitive than humans, are also good indicators of radiation. (Ross, 2015: 25) When the technology offers the access and the possibility to operate different patterns of perception, whether it is aural, bodily or other, it becomes possible to use their infinite variations to create infinite combinations.

TM. As if you are remixing a song, chopping the files into little pieces, and multiplying, and rearranging them. As if you are making more out of this than the whole of what is already embodied. By showing the wiring under the board of showing people the wiring under the board (2017: 78).

KE. As if you are applying technology to dematerialize the rhythm, the drumming, the percussion, taking away its spatio-temporal solidity (1998: 68). And when you rematerialize it in a soundwave, it phaseshifts into hyperrythm, becomes unaccountable, compounded, confounding. It collapses, scrambles the sensorium, adapts the human into a “distributed being” (1998: 77).

OW. But how does this manifest itself in relation to the problem of opposition and separation? The conditions that restructure human and non-human relations, and that allow objects beyond conventional epistemology to be placed in some awareness - what is this realized in?

TM. Let’s take rave as an example. It’s composed of light quanta, electrons, sound waves, turntables, mixers, DJs, affects, FXs, serotonin and physic zone-in. It’s a mixture, a meshwork and a melting pot of human and non-human intensities. Even we are, as well as those surrounding us, do not stand outside it and look in, as into some kind of “nature”. We are all “plugging-in” to or “rocking our bodies” (2015: 116) within a system of diverse ecological flows - a Real which substitutes reality, or the “world for us”. Bodies are no longer some biological substance separated from the mind, they become portals within the machine of rave (Mills, 2018).

EK. And this interaction of human corporeality and imagination with electronic machine generates a high that opens cosmic vistas (Van Veelden, 1999). The successive sonic tides contain clumps of time of different intensities and concentrations. These hypervibrations of the Futurerhythmachine are reenacting in all mediums and all participants of what we call rave.

TM. That illustrates that the universe might have more spacetime in certain parts, like lumpy porridge. Silly, jiggly inconsistency, subscendent lumps of space-time as such (2017: 106-107).

OW. Next to this concept, it is especially ironic that the participants of today's party have overcome the apparently thin and rigid boundary between today and tomorrow. Just as the answer to the question "What time is it?" expressed in the counter-question "What difference does it make?" is acceptable. And digging out the fourth wall, this is where collapse itself is being deployed.

Fig. 3. Disassembling of thin and rigid boundaries
between objects
photo: V. Romanov

Collapse

TM. It turns out, we're in Here and Now part again in some sense. Discussing some specific collapsing time and matter - within the rave-event, or within the LHC - gives us a communication focus. But we should not limit ourselves to one specific event, because otherwise, we will lose the most interesting things. Somebody may apply that to the music, but, taking a different example, gravitons, by definition, wouldn't have time or space as we know them, because they produce space-time. That is the noise they make to beings such as us (2017: 106). Combining inhumanly large and small timescales we may observe how rocks behave like liquids, coming and going, moving, shifting, melting, and, simultaneously, tiny slivers of rock vibrate all by themselves. They vibrate and not vibrate at the same time. (Chiambaretta, n.d.).

OW. So you consider collapse as a condition or prerequisite for the coexistence of time and matter in "ecological thought"?

TM. We are being caught by many catastrophes, hyperobjects - Severing, mass extinction, global warming and many more - simultaneously. The events don't take place “at" a certain “point" in linear time but distribute waves that ripple out in many dimensions, in whose we are caught. They could begin a billion years ago and yesterday, and they are happening now. (2017: 17-18). And through this collapse, these shifts in spatiotemporal perception, ravers are physically accessing and being accessed by the embodied awareness of the ever manifesting presence and non-presence of others (Mills, 2018).

KE. Being into a sensorial and cognitive act of the shared experience, we observed how the formal structures of time collapse, regress to mud, and space loses their dignity, falls kneedeep into the shit of the world (1998:54). The concept is pure inventional, engineered and violent in its essence. But this violence we must undergo means freeing oneself from the ongoing effects of the construction and predetermination of a “future for everybody" that continues to exclude ever-growing parts of humanity and their respective counter-futures (Rosales, 2017).

OW. The constructiveness of the concept, which creates fuel for burning (Wiener, Miller, 1999), seems discussional and revolutionary. As it tries to liberate oneself from a disciplining genealogy, from hierarchically enslaving definitions and arguments following a well-known Western logic, from any quest for truth and verification, to imagine and to invent endless possibilities of re-inventing sonic culture and audio technology (Schulze, 2018).

TM. Revolutions and Big Bangs seems to be very fetishised as theistic miracles. I wouldn't think of a revolution in an old patriarchal way, preferring to normalize it. That is to say there isn't one violent Big Bang of the Event, but lots of medium-sized bangs where violence is distributed throughout the symbiotic real (2017: 115). This is the prerequisite for talking to the Severed humankind from a futural mode that is truly a dimension that haunts and scoops out the present from the inside (2017: 106).

KE. And we are non-obliged to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes which come from the past because our motorsensory system communicates paralinguistically from a future which today's media can't even begin to decrypt (1998: 71). Because we are speaking about music and rave not as about escapism but as machines that create reality (Harper, n.d.).

Fig. 4. Visualization of the audio analysis of the composition ‘Timeless” by Goldie (Price, 1995) using the Texture 3d and Time Machine operators of the TouchDesigner environment. Red lines represent kicks, green lines - snares, bending of a line reflects the intensity of middle frequencies, playing during the composition. Each frame corresponds to a specific moment and also stores data of previously played moments. Non-linear time representation.

Introduction

Discussions about the nature of matter, the relationship between time and space are a component of a whole philosophical branch, including questions of ontological, epistemological nature.

Surrounded by ecological, political and cultural crises of modernity, the man of the Anthropocene epoch predominantly continues to regard time and space as a linear scale of events and objects localized on it. In the view of contemporary philosophers, this ontological monopolization is built on an anthropocentric mindset inherent in Western logic (Morton, 2017: 100), it relies on linguistic means, opposing subject and object, nature and man, the relationship of cause and effect. The origins of these worldviews can be traced not only to Enlightenment philosophy but also to religious notions of super-essence as well as to the principles of agricultural organization of prehistoric society (Morton, 2017:18).

Manifestations of racism, colonialism, speciesism, class inequalities and related conflicts, man-made disasters, the collective trauma of the dispossession of peoples from history, the extinction of species, have accompanied humanity throughout its history, despite the development of technology and humanist ethics. In this context, it is of great interest to examine philosophical practices that analyze and question historically formed ontological approaches, including those that consider the categories of time and space, and that propose new conceptions of the role of humans in the world order.

Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, is a contributor to the Environmental Criticism Project, a representative of the contemporary school of object-oriented ontology. His concept of dark ecology, offering an alternative to the anthropocentric dichotomy of the human and the object environment that opposes it, raises questions about the coexistence of the human with the nonhuman. In one of his recent works, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People, Morton contrasts his idea of solidarity and implosive holism with post-Kantian correlationism, debates Marx, and describes humanity, along with phenomena such as global warming, alienation, as a hyper-object - a bundle of entities massively distributed in time and space that forms an entity in its own right, one that is impossible for humans to see or touch directly. Morton sees time as something inherent in the objects themselves, existing simultaneously on different time scales, as opposed to the anthropocentric linear time. (Morton, 2017: 18) This approach allows for the coexistence of time-stretched processes of mass extinction of species and human agrilogistics as hyperobjects, together with neuronal time, sleep phases, or evolutionary time within the so-called symbiotic real - this multiplicity of temporality is also emphasized in the experimental opera Time Time Time, for which Timothy Morton wrote the libretto.

The methods of multidisciplinary reconsideration of the relationship between object and subject, man and nature, time and space, expressed in creative practices, are meaningfully applied also by another author - DJ, music critic, video essayist and cultural researcher Kodwo Eshun. In the pages of The Geologic Imagination Book by Sonic Acts, next to Morton's essays, Kodwo pays great attention to comprehending different time scales - geological, human and technological time, to find ways to express them through visual and sonic medium (Ross, 2017: 26).
In 1998 Eshun proposed the concept of sonic fiction first in his book as a means of explication of different connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. Modelling a particular discourse that addresses the concepts of hyperrhythm, hypercussion, breakbeat science, the physicality of sound, time travel, electronic musicians and graffiti artists having technological superpowers, neologisms - the whole combination embodies the challenge of the "concept-engineer" to the academia and Western logic. Drawing a parallel to the possibility of shifting tempo and scale, Kodwo endows musical, oral culture with an independent temporality in which it instantly becomes mental, dematerializes and rematerializes, denying the significance of human sense (Kodwo, 1998: 189), echoing the idea of implosive holism of Morton and the Afrofuturist concept of nonlinear time.

The specificity of the method, the revolutionary form, and the critical attitude toward anthropocentrism and Western culture in the works of Morton and Kodwo evoke the ideas of Oswald Wiener, the avant-garde writer, language theorist and cyberneticist who worked on artificial intelligence in the second half of the twentieth century. His experiments with language, structure, and format in his novel The Improvement of Central Europe, his exploration of the possibility of improvisation, and his views on the role of technology and the autonomy of the subject (Morgenroth, n.d.) echo and debate the concepts of Morton and Kodwo.
The loss of the ability of ontological models relying on linear time and localized space to bear the load of explaining phenomena of the Anthropocene illustrates the systemic crisis of notions of world order, dichotomies and the language describing them, and the collapse that accompanies this phenomenon.
In this work, the metaphorical category of collapse characterizes the destruction of ontological hierarchization, and is designed to evoke emotional and physical associations in the course of reading.

The aim of the work is to explore and present the views of Kodwo Eshun and Timothy Morton, in the context of their interpretations of the concepts of time and space, associations with the creative and cultural practices of electronic music, to illustrate and model them in the format of a reproduced dialogue.

The author relies on two main methods: the study of thematic literature, including, but not limited to the works of the mentioned authors, as well as the reenactment of the dialogue between them in order to compare, find the relationships in the authors' positions and create illustrative (fictional) temporal-spatial dynamics. The modified structure of this paper serves the same purpose. Oswald Wiener will moderate the discussion between Kodwo and Morton.

The dialogue takes place in the temporal-spatial environment of the rave-event, which acts not only as an imaginary background but also as an object to which the participants turn as an illustration of their own positions in the general discussion. The inclusion of a game component, a myth, a flexible quotation, underscores, in Morton's terms, the spectral nature of the phenomenon of authorship itself (Morton, 2017: 79).

The consideration of ideas in a dialogue format seeks to set the dynamics of the study, to free itself from the constraints of an isolated examination of authors' ideas, and to provide a synthesis of potential derivations, through discussion, additions, contradictions, and illustrations.

The aim of the work and the methods proposed seem relevant in the context of an attempt to consider complex phenomena and objects, for which it may be difficult to establish their temporal and spatial nature. Addressing electronic music in the context of the essence of media, as well as its physical perception allows exploring and illustrating the concept of multiple temporalities. It is also of interest to consider speculative theories and authors' views on the role and possibilities of creative activity in the context of ecological consciousness.

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dialogue between Kodwo & Morton & Wiener

dialogue between
Kodwo & Morton & Wiener