CHAPTER 8

Time

TIME AND SPACE

All art and media experiences have both temporal and spatial aspects. It takes time to experience them, and we need a physical object for the experience to occur. Often, one aspect dominates. A sculpture is spatially dominant because it exists in three dimensions and has mass, but it is experienced temporally when a museum visitor walks around it. A film in a theater is a temporally dominant experience because the viewer sits for two hours, but the film, projector, and screen have a spatial presence. Watching that same film on your iPod as you carry it with you introduces another spatial element to the experience. A communal public space is replaced by a changing personal space. We experience television as a stream ...

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