Model Systems: Within-Human Temporalities

Abstract Model Systems: Within-Human Temporalities seeks to send our temporal imagination into our guts, and propose listening to our organs and the orchestra of their temporal rhythms. The article and series of accompanying drawings dissect the artwork Model Systems , a series of sculptures re-imagining the organs of the body as hourglasses. In the process it builds on the concept of ‘more-than-human’ to propose ‘within-human temporalities’, focusing on the embodied timekeeping systems of the body. The work explores ways that shifting attention to interior time can challenge our temporal perspectives, softening the mechanical certainty of external time and relocating it in the body. We are situated temporally as well as spatially. Could we then ask not just where we are, but when we are, too? This question necessitates a different awareness of our bodies and their temporalities. It requires the ability to notice our bodies’ rhythmicities, and opens up the possibility of recognising how our own clocks run differently to the ones we wear and the times we live by.