What’s Next? Translating Time, Transforming Objects in the Conservation of Multimedia

The question of “what’s next?” has temporal underpinnings. It pertains to time and how we engage with this concept. “What then is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not” confesses Saint Augustine in the eleventh of thirteen books he wrote in the fourth century titled Confessions.1 To be sure, time is one of the most mysterious aspects of the world we live in. Thinkers have been struggling with questioning the nature of time for centuries, yet the ultimate theory of time still seems to be lacking. With the end of modernism and confronted with the lack of perspective for the new beginnings, thinking about time was allegedly ignored and went out of focus in everything other than secondary literature.2 “In a sense, it is always too late to talk about time,” posited French philosopher Jacques Derrida.3 Korean video artist Nam June Paik, in turn, having acquired a vast number of books devoted to the topic of time, realised that he had absolutely no time to read them.