The possibility of having time to have a world takes on here the force of an ethical-aesthetic imperative: to make a world not through demiurgic creation but through a gesture of sensibly inhabiting the being-in-the-world that we are. To inhabit the world as poets, as Hölderlin suggested, requires an excretion—more than an inscription—capable of shaping the artistic gesture into a sensitive form of thought. Between the sensible and the intelligible, we leave traces; yet our time of travel through the world has narrowed. We transform illusions more than realities and often forget that catastrophe has not been suspended. We need actions and thoughts that commit to one another, weakening catastrophe by opening a space in which sensitivity and thought may circulate.
This effort resonates with contemporary practices that reconsider how to engage with time. Annette Arlander, for example, proposes revisiting—returning to places, gestures, and works—as an artistic method. Repetition, return, and reflection create a duration that thickens through embodied re-encounter with one’s artistic past, expanding the very possibility of “a time that touches.”
We speak of time as a pluriverse, ranging from the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small. The cosmos has fractured into a plurality of worlds, leaving us without guarantees of community. We thus ask whether we should shift from a thought centered on time to a thought of space-time: a mode of being-with that acknowledges we lack the categories to represent the scarcity of both time and space. Perhaps this fragile sketch marks the beginning of an ontology of the singular-plural, as Nancy proposes.
To face this vastness, it becomes essential to narrow distances—especially the distance between art and itself. The existential common ground we seek organizes itself through time, allowing art to operate as a circulation of the real. Today, perhaps art no longer dialogues with the cosmos nor with the polis; perhaps this is its crisis. It becomes urgent to support the multiple—the heterogeneity that allows art to metamorphose at its own rhythm, opening a world capable of revealing itself.
Within this horizon, Barb Macek introduces phantomology, an inquiry into experiences that are absent yet real: pains, memories, and events that occur in “zero time.” Working artistically with absence—through poetry, sound, and drawing—is also a way of engaging with vastness, with what escapes the sensible while shaping the body. Art here does not create presence but creates the conditions for the absent to act.
This concern with temporality also appears in Tat Kuen Ko’s rethinking of time-based art, which traditionally unfolds across measurable segments of time. By examining performance, moving image, sound loops, and computational installations, Ko shows that looping structures and viewer-chosen points of entry transform beginnings and endings into fluid, subjective thresholds. Even static media may carry time-based materials and a sense of imminence, revealing that temporal experience is never solely determined by duration but also by how the artwork organizes attention, recurrence, and expectation. This expansion of the time-based reminds us that temporality is not a medium but a condition of perception itself.
Perhaps we must therefore abandon the metaphysics of presence—that chained time driving us toward the next step and installing us in operative immobility. We propose instead a spacing of time: suspending the flow in order to inaugurate. Returning to the world with sufficient distance allows time to stretch, to breathe.
From this emerges a thought-action that escapes both necessity and chance: a vibrational ontology, an aesthetics of the fortuitous, a micro-utopia of Deleuze’s n-1. Delay becomes necessary, even with limited means. Art is tasked with thinking the unthought—the event that comes from no project, no plan, no need.
This reflection on time resonates with Ina Thomann’s investigation of temporal perception in long-duration performances. In Haltezeit, time ceases to be chronological and becomes qualitative, approaching Bergson’s durée. The body—its fatigue, its restlessness, its moments of calm—stretches or condenses lived duration. Artistic experience reveals that time can function as malleable, subjective material—a dimension the we are also invoking while imagining another mode of inhabiting the world.
Finally, Guy Livingston shows how Cage’s 4'33”, in the era of YouTube, becomes a mirror of contemporary temporalities. Mediated silence turns into performance, forcing viewers to confront the fragmented, quantified time of digital platforms. To sit through four minutes and thirty-three seconds of “nothing” is to accept a duration that resists the regime of perpetual distraction. This tension between presence and absence, attention and dispersion, echoes the HUB’s central question: how can we listen to the world in a time that continuously disarticulates listening?
Between despair and revolt, can art still imagine a world open to the pleasure of living, without requiring revelation? Artistic manifestation affirms that freedom can be exceeded, that human existence tends toward the search for meaning, and that art and language are ways of sustaining this search. The world does not arise from necessity; it is simply there. And despite the empires of the Self, of money, of God, it remains erratic, open, infinite.