What is a (Sonic) Time Machine: What is it for? From Dark and Black Quantum Futurism to Coil’s ‘Time Machines’ project and La Dispute’s ‘King Park’

This article will go over some of the main inspirations behind the Time Machines symposium, looking at different conceptions and functions of time machines across a range of media arts. While Dark might seem to offer the most literal example of a time machine, this turns out to be strange and impossible device, itself dependent on time travel in its manufacture out of elements from different time periods and therefore calling into question questions of linear temporal. The Black Quantum Futurism collective deliberately combine elements from Afrofuturism and Quantum physics to undo the oppressions of linear chronological time via a range of media art practices, exhibitions and workshops, including workshops in time travel. Coil’s Time Machines project makes use of a different kind of loop, of analogue sonic repetitive drones, to generate a disturbed temporal experience for the listener that ‘under the right conditions’ (social, cognitive, chemical) may constitute a form of quantum time travel. All of the above can be considered as machines for escaping linear chronological time, even if these escapes may have their own dangers and limitations depending on the context. Finally, the article will do an analysis of the post hardcore band La Dispute’s ‘King Park’, an emotionally intense song revolving around the accidental shooting of a child and the consequences of this for the killer. More than just objective reportage or story-telling, I will argue that the song both lyrically and sonically inhabits the events it describes and enacts a mode of time travel to revisit these traumatic events and to re-experience them from multiple perspectives. As such , I will argue that this, alongside the other examples mentioned, resonate strongly with Deleuzian conceptions not only of chronological time as a chronic condition that artistic practices draw various lines of flight from, but also of the event as an acausal ad non-linear intensity, always capable of being re-actualised in the present.