“Deep Time Rapid Time” is a laboratory/training site for sensing and rethinking temporality. At the center of the investigation is a philosophical question about how we sense time which, spurse argues, holds deep practical and political implications for our contemporary situation and for our rapidly changing future.

Deep time is a term which references time measured in the thousands, millions, or billions of years. Rapid time, conversely, indicates the capacity of immensely scaled systems to change in very short time periods. Across scales and speeds, time is more than simply one event following another—time is a form of qualitative transformation prior to and parallel to being a form of quantitative measure. And our general inability to conceive and engage time as such presents a complex problem when it comes to enacting new relationships to everything from ecologies, to advanced technologies, to emerging forms of government. Across the globe we are rapidly producing many new forms of time, from the half-life of radioactive materials that can be millions of years, to vast ecosystems that will have radically changed in 30 years. “How do we understand these new forms of temporality,” spurse asks “and respond with the creation of new forms of collective subjectivity, logics of sense, and new conceptual systems?”

“Deep Time Rapid Time” begins with questions such as these and aims to address them at levels beyond abstraction or representation—viewing them as embodied worldly problems which can be creatively and collaboratively engaged to create “new modes of enaction” using a wide range of experimental strategies. As such, the project is also conceived as an “elaborate emergent trial/game,” with materials and logics drawn from the realms of clothing and textile design, plant biology and engineering, paleontology, architecture, philosophy, rare book holdings, augmented reality/visualization research, and numerous other sources.