AUGMENTED TEMPORALITY

In 2010 ‘cameraist’ Jason Powell received national attention in the USA on a number of news sites and blogs for his ‘Looking into the Past’ project, which National Public Radio's Robert Krulwich called ‘Time Travel on the Cheap’. For this project, Powell searched the online photo archive of the Library of Congress for old black-and-white photographs of landmarks and other stillexisting locales in order to take a picture of his hand holding up the photographs against their present-day locations. The vintage photos are perfectly aligned with the backdrop of the present to look like a window into the past. In similar fashion, the ‘StreetMuseum’ app, launched by the Museum of London in 2010, geotags its archival photographs and paintings of London's ‘thousands of years of turbulent history’ to their current locations in the city, thereby offering tourists ‘a window through time’ and embedding portions of the museum in situ: users hold their mobile-phone cameras up to a ‘present day street scene and see the same London location appear’ from the past, either as a simple image or as ‘a ghostly overlay on the present day scene’. Speaking of analogous literary devices in SF, the novelist Stephen Baxter describes such ‘past viewers’ as a ‘technology of omniscience’ that allows us, as H. G. Wells once put it in his 1921 Neanderthal fantasy ‘The Grisly Folk’, ‘to walk again in vanished scenes, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago’ (Fig. 1.1 and Plate 4).

Against such sunny returns to the past, Baxter provides examples of literary past viewers that present more complicated versions of the past and present. In J. G. Ballard's ‘The Sound-Sweep’, for instance, the past is not a simple zone worth ‘looking into’ for clean comparative leaps, but is instead the site of grimy, accumulated residues of minor happenings that must be cleansed and removed from dignif ed artefacts and present objects. The sweeper can perceive and must ‘sonovac’ from a thirteenth-century chapel ‘all extraneous and discordant noises – coughing, crying, the clatter of coins’ that have settled on the ‘beautiful sonic matrices rich with seven centuries of Gregorian chant’.