The past and the future are not absent, but fully belonging to the present, and history holds a grip on all of us. It pretends, avoids, assumes, and confronts us as we live through it and because of it. Histories are shared, not only through human affairs but also in everything around us—the blades of shoreline vegetation or the silence of a distant northern light. There is an asymmetry to this ontological framing of time that reflects on its alterities. What seems true is that the past and its lingering presence are never alone and do not sit idle. What if we understood time as other-than fixed or linear, but instead always fluid, complex, sublime, contested, forgotten, and ever-changing? What if we considered that the realities of time is that every beginning and ending is unfolding into each ending and every beginning?
In my research, time is a tempest— interstitial forces of histories with stories to tell. This concept of time is central to both my personal and academic life. And as with all stories, my story begins somewhere in the middle, which continues to be a critical space for me to ponder curiosities about how one might grasp the re/articulations of past experiences and perceptions. These ideas of the interstitial have been a constant throughout my research. The ways in which the past continually presents itself seem critically important in thinking about questions of what it is like to experience the re/emergences of the past as embodied perception. As philosopher Dylan Trigg proposes in his book, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012), experiences are shaped by how the past is reconciled in the present. The traces and indeterminacies of past experiences and the perceptions of them linger as potential. Thus, the middle reflects a time when the relational potentialities of experiences are emerging, existing, and evolving in ways that might tell us something valuable about how the indeterminacies of perception are affective and determinate. In this context, central to my research are ontological ideations of a middle that is historical, agentic, and discontinuous.
David Herman Jr.
Assistant Professor of Art Education
now/they/them
Assistant Professor of Art Education
now/they/them
Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Temple University
2001 N. 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122
tyler.temple.edu