Chiasmic time: Being-in-time in time being

Abstract

Time Being is a collaborative film made by Ruairí Corr and Deborah Robinson that explores the temporalities that emerge when the primacy of sight and sound in film is brought together with touch, breath, vibration, smell, heat, and other somatic sensations that enable us to feel ourselves in and through the world, remaking it as we go. Ruairí is a creative maker living with a complex set of visual and sensory-processing differences related to the condition adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). Deborah is an artist who uses film and neurodivergent experiences of time and attention in ways that disrupt narrative sequence. As Ruairí and Deborah developed a collaborative relationship over time, they used practice-as-research methods that attended to Ruairí’s everyday experience to develop forms of audio-visual representation that reframe normative versions of time. They worked together to find ways of holding in film the time made when the world is sensed through the hands, the lungs, the stomach, the skin, and through the temporal displacements of alternative experiences of sight and sound. Through a practice of waiting, slowing, and attending to these sensations, the work gradually emerged. This was not a form of coming to know ‘about’ the world, but one of making sense of it ‘otherwise’, over and through time. And as the film slows the viewer down, inviting them to wait with and dwell in the images and sounds, it works to expand understandings of how the senses work according to multiple yet distinct tempos, beats, and rhythms.