ISEA2024: 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art

ISEA2024 sets out to explore human perception of timescales and challenge our understanding of past, present and future in the days of singularity and climate change – the Everywhen.

The Everywhen is the concept of all time simultaneously present in a place and describes the notion that past, present and future are co-habiting any given location. Where many western cultures believe time is the constant and travels in a linear progression from now to then, First Nations Australians describe the before then, then, now and the future then existing in the constant presence of place: The Everywhen.

It is believed that in the time before time, all creation was made and manifest in the landscape; that all stories, art, song, dance, imaginative thought, creative inspiration, technology or invention was made complete in the time before time and can be seen in the topography, plants, animals and natural world. Some have described this concept as the Dreaming or Dreamtime where a web of stories and songs hold the landscape together (as described in Songlines by Bruce Chatwin[1]). Still, by co-opting the phrase Everywhen as applied by Australian Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner[2], we can better expand the more sophisticated scientific notion of time and space, that all time is accessible at every point in time. By sitting on country you can access all of creation.

In this concept the creative act is not a process of unconnected inspiration, solo achievement or act of individual hubris but rather the process of timely connection to the landscape, accessing the already laid out ‘creation’ and relaying this to others. The role of the artist is to be the interlocutor between past, present and future through their deep relationship to place.

Art is an act of memory. 

The destruction of the environment is the destruction of creation and builds obstacles to accessing inspiration and ‘new’ thought. The busying of yourself removes you from the state of mind where you find deep connections to place. The western concepts of personal ownership and copyright can be antithetical to notions of collective responsibility, collaboration and social and environmental ecological connections.

We see the Everywhen as a way of accessing notions of Deep Time, the Metaverse and the Multiverse through rooting ourselves to a specific Where. In a time of globalisation, how can we value where we are and make art that connects through time.