A Question of Time

Join us for the first joint symposium of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning and the Department of Humanities and Arts.

In an often-quoted passage from his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo expressed an essential paradox in the relationship between humanity’s experience and understanding of time.

“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.”

Indeed, the contrast between our intimate familiarity with time and our elusive understanding of it is striking. We all feel time’s flow yet find it difficult to articulate what it means; we rely on clocks to manage our daily lives yet hardly agree on what clocks actually measure; we all use the word routinely and in various ways — “I’m out of time”; “give it more time”; “time is money”; “time heals everything” — but are unable to put our fingers on what exactly this thing is (if a “thing” at all) that heals, that costs, and that no one ever has enough of.

Art and science have always been striving, in their own ways, to understand and capture our experience of time. Whether through its materialization, symbolization, quantification, or representation, time does not only affect artworks and scientific projects but can serve as a subject and material for scientific and artistic inquiry and experimentation.

A collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning and the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, the symposium, A Question of Time, brings together the histories and philosophies of science and technology, art history, as well as the history and theory of architecture and landscape, to explore the various the implications of time in humanities, sciences, and the arts.