Apart from the original mentioning of l'Horloge à Vent in Raymond Roussel's 'Impressions d'Afrique', a lot of artists and writers, philosophers or just creatively thinking people like you and me, were thinking about time. Here follow some examples...
Mainly we are following the following thread:
theoretically
- ecology as a subversive attitude (now let's define ecology and subversivity better)
- media technology as a subversive attitude (and essentially experimental)
methodologically
- explorations into how disciplines currently change, esp. anthropology and etnography, finding new content and methods
- ways of building up new approaches, insights and methodologies, esp. constructivism, grounded theory and ANT
aesthetically
- how can a new hypothetical poetica for the non-existing ecological media arts be constructed bottom up
- what are useful insights from within the arts and other sciences (hansen, smithson, ...)
in general
- what is emerging today not as historical and educational artefacts
- what is the value of something new
When talking at http://okno.be about it, Kyd asked this question about it: "I'm finding only little and random info online. "
So was sending this, apart from the references to Raymond Roussel, and Robert Smithson:
Ilya Prigogine et Isabelle Stengers: "Entre le temps et l'éternité", which was never translated in english, prigogine decided to write by himself "the end of certainty" on similar ideas, without stengers, and you will only find these kind of abstracts online, like:
Une énigme marque la physique depuis Galilée.
Pourquoi cette science a-t-elle, dès l'origine, fait le choix de l'éternité contre le temps du devenir ? Pourquoi a-t-elle répété la plus paradoxale des négations, celle de la flèche du temps, qui traduit pourtant la solidarité de notre expérience avec le monde où nous vivons ? La question du temps a créé une tension entre l'idée d'un monde régi par des lois intemporelles et déterministes et l'expérience humaine, mémoire du passé, ouverture de l'avenir.
Elle a également opposé la physique aux autres sciences, et les lois " fondamentales " aux descriptions phénoménologiques qui, elles, traduisent la flèche du temps. Mais aujourd'hui se dessine une cohérence nouvelle qui ouvre la physique aux interrogations du devenir, à l'émergence du nouveau qu'elle avait niée. La question du temps, un et multiple, articule notre besoin de construire une conception plus unifiée du monde avec la multiplicité des regards que ce dernier exige de nous.
Un renouvellement des connaissances qui nous fait découvrir une science créatrice de significations, délivrée de l'utopie d'un savoir infini, une ?uvre humaine, située elle-même entre le temps et l'éternité.
beautiful, no? I read it a decade ago I guess and it is a wonderful book, also mark the presence of Isabelle Stengers etc... don't know where I left the book...
Then about "the three ecologies" by felix guattari, there are several versions and including here one, but the better one may be in the book of the same title published by continuum press in 2000, for which he added some pages before and after and a new translation was made, a better one and really that makes the difference! http://www.iaacblog.com/2008-2009/term03/rs2/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/...
There will be a lot of references about Bergson and time, read the second part of his famous Time and Free Will: An essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, about the multiplicity of conscious states and the idea of duration, which you can download from here: http://www.archive.org/details/timeandfreewilla00berguoft, but basically in the abstract about his work "the creative mind" you will find the ideas about time (I do not agree too much with bergson, esp where he brings in the intuitive as a dualistic feature almost, but read through that and his conceptualization of time and the inclusiveness of space can be found here) http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/bergson.html
Finally I am working also with Matt Fuller's Media Ecologies, but lately got more inspired by Paul Rabinow's work, from which I am reading now "marking time, on the anthropology of the contemporary", from which I am drawing the methodological implications, and applying them to creative processes, in addition to what I was working with already, which was mostly based on Actor Network Theory, and recently a renewed interest in Grounded Theory. If we are talking about artistic research we might as well take it more serious as artists and look into alternatives to what academies and universities offer as a closed discipline they call research, the latter allows you to use research as a toolbox for building theory bottom-up, so when you relate it to the act of creativity... you see what I mean? actually the pages in wikipedia are good as an introduction if you are interested in it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-Network_Theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory