"Archivists
of the Future": Katie Paterson and David Mitchell
David
Mitchell and Katie Paterson presented work at the ISST's conference
"Time's Urgency," at the University of Edinburgh in June
2016: Mitchell read three unpublished short stories, and Paterson
talked about several of her artworks, and the two then engaged in a
dialogue about Paterson’s Future Library, in which a forest of
trees will become an anthology of books to be printed in 100 years
(2114), composed of works contributed by authors each year and held
in trust. Mitchell was the second author invited to contribute a
text; to date, Margaret Atwood and Sjón have also deposited works, and Elif Shafak has just been named as the next invitee.
“Archivists of the future,” which evokes many aspects of Mitchell
and Paterson’s work, is a phrase from Mitchell’s The
Bone Clocks (2014)—Paul
Harris.
Paul Harris: Let’s begin with Future Library as an archive of the future—Katie, what was the germination of the idea? Can you talk about it in relation to your sense of time?
Katie Paterson:
The idea to grow trees to print books arose for me through making a
connection with tree rings to chapters, the material nature of paper,
pulp and books, and imagining writer’s thoughts infusing themselves,
‘becoming’ the trees, over an expansive period of time. As if the trees
absorb the writer’s words like air or water, and the tree rings become
chapters, spaced out over the years to come.
The beginnings of Future Library could
be anything from the small sketch of tree rings as chapters I made on a
train several years ago, or the seedlings that have been planted, or
the first words written. The idea for Future Library happened
in a micro second where notions of time, growth, future, place, stories,
pulp, matter, cells, smells, all collapsed into one.
Future Library has
pillars, and an inherent ecology, parts interact to create the whole.
The forest, the growth, the pulp, the soil, the light and all the
natural ingredients that will bring the paper and books into being in
the future. The texts, and the manuscripts written by 100 authors, over
and through time. The ideas stored within the trees before harvest. The
Silent Room, housed in an city landscape, that looks out to the forest
and vice versa. Future Library exists in many spheres, many of
them unseen (words written and read by unborn people, held in the
current imagination). There are material and immaterial aspects.
Future Library is
not a directly environmental statement, but involves ecology, the
interconnectedness of things – those living now and still to come. It
questions the present tendency to think in short bursts of time, making
decisions only for us living now. It’s an artwork made not only for us
now, but for a future generation, in an unknown time and place.
Future Library connects
with my wider art practice through its engagement with nature and time –
long, slow time. Whilst previous works have dealt with time on geologic
or cosmic scales (the billions of years light has travelled from an
exploding star, the million year ages of ancient fossils) in many ways
the human timescale of 100 years is more confronting. It is beyond many
of our current lifespans, but close enough to come face to face with, to
comprehend and relativize. Inside the forest time stands still. This
place could have existed for one hundred, one thousand, one million, or
even one hundred million years.
PH: David, what was your response to the invitation and the project, and what was the challenge of it?
David Mitchell:I
wasn’t quite sure how ‘for real’ Katie’s proposal was when my agent
first passed it on, even though came from Simon Prosser, a respected
editor and trustworthy acquaintance. A hundred years? Nobody reads the
manuscript? Really? I receive offers from half-baked to fully-baked
to decidedly uncooked and I didn’t know where to place this one. Then I
learned that Margaret Atwood had taken the plunge the first year and,
feeling a little foolish, I thought, Fine, it’s for real.
I began to
think about the beauty of launching a little bottle with my message in
it onto the sea of time, and knowing that people not yet born will
receive it, and read it, and think about the long-dead sender of the
bottle. It’s almost like a phone line to them: I can wave at them, and
say ‘Hi!’ and see them wave back. It also feels like an affirmation
that they, and books, and trees, and Norway, and civilisation, will
still be there in a hundred years. After the last couple of years, I
need that affirmation like Asterix needs his magic potion. In
demonstrable everyday senses as well as some strands of Buddhist
theology, the future is crafted by thought. The Future Library Project
is a manifestation of this idea.
As you know, I
can’t tell you too much about my artistic response, i.e. what I
submitted, because of the scroll Katie made me sign in blood during that
weird ritual on a blasted heath with the witches. All I’ll say is, I
wrote something that engaged with the spirit of the project and played
with its themes, particularly time and human memory and history. The
title, which we are encouraged to make public, contains a few clues: From Me Flows What You Call Time. Which I nicked from Tōru Takemitsu, the Japanese composer.
The
challenge… was there a particular challenge? I’m not sure. When
writers were writing fiction in 1917 they weren’t thinking about what
would and what wouldn’t make sense to us, in 2017 – and good luck to any
of them who may have tried, because their attempts would have been
doomed. They were just trying to write as well as they could. I did
the same. Nobody knows who the future writers are going to be – many of
these, too, are not yet born – but it’s a safe bet the standard of work
is going to be very high, so when the whole library is published in
2114, I don’t want mine to look too shoddy.
PH: Each
in your own way archivists of the future in your work. Can you talk
about how that interest evolved? And, there is a specific temporality
that is opened—the duration is different, its correspondence to reality
is different….
KP: Future Library could
be seen as a future archive. Most of the project doesn’t yet exist, it
is archiving the unknown. It extends into the past and future, through
layers of time and distance. It looks back and forward in time
simultaneously: from the history of printed books on paper, to future
authors who aren’t yet born, trees that aren’t grown, words yet
unwritten and unimagined.
Future Library unfolds
concurrently over long, slow time – a century – and the present moment -
the diurnal, daily cycles of the trees, the seasons, and the author’s
yearly contributions and handover events. The momentary, imperceptible
changes in the growth of the trees, the unread words in the author’s
manuscripts take shape year by year. The project is marked out by yearly
demarcations like chapters in a book, which keep it fluid. It exists in
the here and now, as well as for and into an unknown future whose
temporality and correspondence to reality is distant and skewed. The
duration of 100 years seems on the fringes of being graspable and
knowable.
DM: I’m
writing this three months after Katie wrote the above, so I get to read
her answers just before I write mine. It’s a little intimidating: God,
she’s so smart! Much more clod-hoppingly, then, I’m an archivist of
the future insofar as I like to set stories there, and in order to do so
I need to know what my characters know. Meaning, I have to know their
pasts, and the recent history of their worlds – which lies, of course,
in the future as viewed from the early twentieth century. Why do I like
to set things in the future? Dunno… Because I’m me? Because I read
Isaac Asmiov and Ursula le Guin and William Gibson and watched Star Trek and Doctor Who when I was kid, and thought, Wow, that works for me… I’d like to do that too…? Could be.
“Can you talk about how that interest evolved?”
Well, I hope I get better at doing it… And my work needs to be
different each time, otherwise I’m repeating myself, and that’s rude to
my readers and dull for me. My (non-verbal) son’s autism makes me
wonder about how he perceives time, and these wonderings are rearing
their heads in a few recent pieces of fiction. Similarly, my daughter
has taught me a lot about DC and Marvel superheroes, some of whom are
studies in atypical temporalities (normally I’d put that in quotes but
in the present company I don’t feel the need.) Quicksilver and The
Flash, for example, whose superpower is moving about the place faster
than a bullet: from their perspective, they’re not fast – it’s us, and
everyone else, who is trapped in a much much slower stream of time. I
wrote a story about this recently, called My Eye on You. (“The
pram in the hallway is the enemy of art”? What a tawdry,
opportunity-wasting way to think – my kids have enriched my creative
life beyond all measure.) And, if this doesn’t sound too sycophantic,
my conversations with a certain Paul Harris and his neighbour Pierre
Jardin have beefed up how I think about time, by adding ‘time’ to the
list of singular nouns that ought really to be plurals. We live in a
matrix of times, with an ’s’. Calendrical, life-span, diurnal,
monthly, historic, geological, planetary, caffeine-hit-to-caffeine-hit,
to name just those that spring to mind right now. The question is
less, ‘Why does temporality fascinate you?’ and more ‘How could
temporality possibly not fascinate you?’
PH: It
seems no accident that you are both interested in the deep past in your
work, as much as the future. What is the relation between stretching
the boundaries of cultural and cosmic memory and looking to the future?
KP:
Astronomy is important to me and figures in so many of my artworks,
mostly due to the revelations of the deep interconnections between
humans and everything else. This can be evident through the geological
connections in the strata on earth, to the remnants of supernovas
flowing through our blood. I’m interested in how we attempt to
contemplate ideas of being able to look back in time, to the beginnings
of the universe. I was astonished to learn that all the matter that
exists now in the universe is all that will ever exist, because
everything - all the stars, galaxies and matter - is moving away from
each other so quickly, it can no longer collide and produce new objects.
For me, these are ideas that just can’t be rationalized. How do we
conceive of a time before the earth existed? Being able to look through
powerful telescopes and witness eras in the universe so inexplicably
distant can heighten awareness of deep time and stretch cosmic memory,
from the past into the future.
You
could say there is a cosmic memory engrained in the materials and
phenomena I tend to work with: fractions of Saharan sand, the
billion-year-old light from dying stars, ancient darkness from the edges
of the early universe, to fossil beads from the first single-celled
life on earth, and slides which chart the unknown evolving universe.
These materials project the imagination forward and backwards through
time and space. The beads could be micro future or past planets. Looking
to the most distant past can feel like a journey into an infinite
future. To experience time billions of years ago now, looking to a time
proceeding the earth and ourselves, I find this almost as challenging as
looking forward into an expansive future.
DM: Yeah, what she said.
I keep
answering your questions with more questions, Paul – do the Germans have
a word for that? – and here I go again: would it not be profoundly odd
to be interested in the future but not the past, or vice versa? Time is
all time, not just one stretch of it. Isn’t every line infinite, and
what we call a line not, in fact, a true line, but only a segment of a
line?
PH: You
both stretch temporal boundaries in your work, and you both create work
known for challenging artistic forms, genres, limits or conventions.
Can you talk about the relation between these things?
KP:
A sense of limits, or impossibility, is a filter I don’t think I was
born with. Conventions rarely rule my creative life: curiosity, and
making this kind of artwork, can be liberating. I am grateful that forms
and genres are something I don’t tend to dwell on – the idea at hand
never does - whether that involves the colour of the end of time,
working with nano-materials or carving out records made of glacial ice
in a deep freezer. Stretching temporal boundaries may not be in my field
everyday experience, but is wide open and malleable when it can take
shape in the mind and imagination.
DM: Reality
stretches temporal boundaries. Reality challenges artistic forms,
genres, limit and conventions. I merely follow its lead.
Maybe what a
temporal boundary or convention in my art – novels should be linear, for
example, with no back-flashes or forward-flashes – has in common with
genre boundary is its artifice, its arbitrariness, the fact that a
human, or a critic (not that critics aren’t human) decided the boundary
is there. Thus these things are analogous to cartography. While
cartography is sometimes connected to the geography it draws lines upon,
geography for its part doesn’t pay much attention to cartography.
Cartography, to be sure, is an interesting discipline. Geography,
however, is freakin’ awesome.
PH: Your
work induces a kind of temporal vertigo, produces experiences of sudden
unbounding of time, a lovely phrase for which is a "phoenix flash of
reverie," from Gaston Bachelard. Have you had experiences of this kind?
Or, do you seek to integrate such moments into your work or open that
kind of experience to viewers/readers?
KP: A phoenix flash of reverie, catching hold of unbounding of time, I
would like to make the mandate of my creative practice. This is
something I aspire to attaining with regularity, but time plays tricks.
There might be a flash, and then three years of bringing an idea into being. I’m currently working on a book of Ideas,
you could say a book of temporary flashes, a repository of reverie. It
brings together short statements of intent, works that exist, that don’t
exist, that may exist, that are there simply to exist in the
imagination. The Ideas all three-lined short, almost Haiku-like
expressions, their subjects ranging from earth and the moon, to the
very distant edges of light, unbounded time and space. The Ideas are
mixed up with works that I have already brought into the world,
blurring a fictional line. Some are way off scale, and are clearly
things that you can’t do in this world. I wanted to evoke and activate
them in the reader’s mind.
Working on
lengthy research and busy production processes can contradict creativity
so I found a way to work spontaneously, stripping years of work to only
a few words, which can be communicated instantly with the reader. If
flashes of reverie can be rich, does it matter if an experience exists
for a nano-second or beyond?
DM: ‘A
phoenix flash of reverie’ is indeed a lovely phrase: it is also highly
interpretable. For me, it makes me think of the ‘long moments’ I may
experience a handful of times a year when I feel like I’m removed from
the ceaseless whitewater hurly burly of time, and I feel intensely aware
of the present moment, of right now; and intensely conscious that this
isn’t how things usually are; and intensely calm, with the PAUSE button
pressed on the monkey mind, mid-banana or mid-armpit scratch. I don’t
know what brings these moments on. I suspect they just find me, and I’m
duly grateful, because they feel wonderful. The boundary between me
and everything else feels membrane-light and transparent, at these
times. The word ‘vertiginous’ applies: these moments make me catch my
breath at the changed perspective. I think more clearly, or at least I
think I do. It’s like being in Rivendell. Then, suddenly, the reverie
is gone and I’m out faffing with hobbits, the annoying ones, or getting
impaled by orcs again, and I forget things were ever different until the
next reverie comes along, days or weeks or months later – or until I
think about them, which I’m doing now.
PH: What associations do you have with our 2016 conference theme, "Time's Urgency"?
KP:
I associate this idea with our current sense of urgency in terms of
acting and creating change, in relation to our lifetimes, the next
generation’s lifetimes, and the next. Beyond these coming centuries,
time starts to stretch into the infinite and neverending, into geologic
or cosmic stretches of time, where a sense of urgency falls away.
DM: I
associate this idea with mortality. Time has all the time in the
world, in the universe – I can’t imagine Time ever really ‘doing’
urgency. This hairy skin bag of organs and tubes and inlets and
orifices and nerves and secreting glands we fondly think of as ‘Me’,
however, most certainly does not have all the time in the
world. Famously, and truly, our supply of time is spent at an
accelerating rate as we age. Let’s not waste the stuff on grudges, or
angry arguments inside our heads with people who cannot hear us because
they aren’t there, or clickbait, or fretting over things we are wholly
powerless to influence. The singer-songwriter David Crosby has a song
called Time is the Final Currency. It’s not a particularly great song, but it’s a great title. It’s true.
PH: On
behalf of the ISST, I want to thank you both for enriching our
conference with your presentations, and participating in this
conversation. As both a fan and scholar of both of your singular,
inspiring bodies of work, I look forward to seeing how they develop, and
hope you will attend a future ISST conference.
This interview will be printed in the forthcoming Time's Urgency: The Study of Time XVI (Brill), Robert Daniel and Carlos Montemayor, eds.