The Helmholtz Curves: Tracing Lost Time
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Preface
Get accessProfessor of Media Studies
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Published:15 September 2014
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Extract
Lost time is the temporal gap between sensation and movement, perception and thought, decision and action. It is not a time that is forgotten. It is not the time of missing memories. Nor is it a time squandered or wasted. Lost time is never the time of futility, idleness, or sleeplessness. It is the time of suspension, of opening, of possibility.
In the summer of 2009 I was working in the archives of the Paris Academy of Science, doing research for a larger study on the history of braintime experiments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was there and then that the Helmholtz curves interrupted my stream of thought. What I suddenly had before my eyes were writing-images that oscillated in fascinating ways between transparency and obscurity. The Helmholtz curves immediately captured me, disrupted the work on my larger study, and drove me to write this book. The rest of my work came to a halt. It had to pause. In this sense, the present book owes its existence to a kind of “lost time.”
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