DP

©David Braden, 2016

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Time Loop  is 3 minutes 21.5 seconds in length.  If a year lasts a tenth of a second,  then two-thousand and fifteen years would go by in three minutes, twenty-one and a half seconds; each second a decade, a century going by every 10 seconds.  2015 is composed  of three 2015 millisecond clips: 

• “In the year of our lord”
• “In the year of our lord” (reversed)
• “Two-thousand fifteen”

The clips are looped through a music software program (Max/MSP) which gradually adds/reveals  more and more of the clip in increments of 50 milliseconds (which in the analogy above equals  5 years).

Seconds, milliseconds, centuries, years are only words to describe numbers to describe time. To understand 2015 we have to understand 0. To understand zero, we have to acknowledge that 0 is not really 0 at all. The years before zero which run backwards like negative integers contradict our faith in time as a unidirectional movement forward. 2015 is not an entity unto itself, separate from 2014 or 2016. Instead 2015 holds all past and future years within it, like repeated loops.

For Jewish people 2015 is 5775, and for Muslims 2015 is still 578 years away. These representations of time were created by religions who aligned their numbering with their founding of their beliefs. The act of naming  of each year  reinforced the  validity of each religion, and were a way of  insuring that the myths would survive through the ages.  

Despite having fallen out of common usage, the phrase “in the year of our Lord” is still contained within the idea of “2015.” And the capitalization of “Lord” to signify an omnipresent Creator, reveals a religion inextricably bound up in histories of power, conflict and inequality that remain raw and volatile in 2015/5775/1437.

©David Braden, 2016

David Braden lives in Oakland. By day he is an Elementary  Literacy Coach for Oakland Unified School District. By night, he fights crime with experimental  poetry and sounds.  His work is  at www.davidbraden.weebly.com.