TIME LAPSES

“Wilderness was the Condition of the world within which mankind lived in perplexed pockets, plotting our little patches of garden plots hard by the great forests of wilderness.  But then the human race gigantized in development, exploded in population across the world so that, past a critical point, wilderness and mankind changed places.  It is now something we surround; there are pitiful pockets of wilderness dotted across the world; wilderness is now the Exception….” Jay Griffiths  A Sideways Look at Time

Although this quote is referring to the condition of wilderness in our landscape, the book investigates how we perceive time in our present world and how different the human relationship with time has been in the past.  Griffiths draws the analogy between the disappearance of wilderness (wild land) and the disappearance of “wild” time.  She defines wild time as time that is not measured, counted, recorded, or named; truly free time.  The work I am embarking on will attempt to explore how we perceive, manage, and experience time in contemporary life.  The clock keeps ticking, and every moment is accounted for, every moment has a number, a place we have to be, something we have to do.  The lack of time is common to most of us, at best annoying, at worst suffocating.