Signata (Jun 2019)
Éléments d’analyse figurative, thématique et axiologique des représentations et visualisations numériques de la temporalité
Abstract
Among transformations driven by digital developments, the relationship to time, and in particular the representations of time arising from these changes, form a specific, large and varied corpus. Visual temporalities that unfold in this context, be it a sign or an object or visual environments, have the characteristic of being freed from any constraints of time. They materialize the transposition or diversion of some instruments used to mesure time, and can even lead to the emergence of singular forms of temporality. Digital time is a controlled time, it is virtual and deprived of any tangible space; it is an immediate time, a “real time”, or so perceived in the use of social networks and information devices. It is a modelled time, or a time to be modelled in order to experiment with browsing on digitized resources and/or information contents in databases. It is also, ultimately, a succession of clues about the modes of contemporary perception and representations of time. Browsing in the temporality of the extracted resources, for instance from a museum database or a historical databases, or in information productions such as blogs or walls, has enhanced the emergence of various devices: web browsing history, timeline, and Wayback machine devices in which time is an object of study for modeling and interactive experiments. The analysis of this specific corpus as a dynamic grammar and iconic visual signs of temporality, aims to identify the generic properties, indices and affordances of these devices, staged by the visual, perceptual and cognitive frameworks of the digital experience of time.In digital environments, it is as if temporality were suspended. There is no “too early” or “too late” but there is a “time for action”. Strongly correlated with the interactive experience, the “immediate” as a time marker of action, requires “mediation”, when it is not directly perceptible because it results in a visual mediation. And in parallel, time supposedly doomed to irreversibility is nevertheless open to reversibility when located in the digital temporality. Relying on a methodology based on segmentation by Temporal Semiotic Units, this paper considers how the interactive visual experience of time unfolds. Thus, through a corpus of examples distributed into four thematic sections, it highlights the most significant aspects of developments in the representation of time. This attempt to draw a typology also calls into question the forms of temporality and the interactive visualization of such temporalities, as well as the usage of these devices that leads to a new relationship to time and, thereby, to other forms of access to knowledge.
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