Time Types and Table Manners

This article will discuss, using the collaborative project Dinner Table as a guideline, notions of time, information manipulation and social entanglement in electronic art.
Dinner Table is an interactive experience machine that mimics a game of life and creates scenarios for a cast of characters in an anonymous urban setting. It is a table, a machine and a game simultaneously. DinnerTable lives in a restaurant setting and feeds in this intimate interface between the private and public on external stimuli collected through speech recognition and a vision system. Visual and audio inputs are used to direct the paths of a narrative engine that spins off narrative tracks, enacted on the game board by game board figures and made understandable to users in text, motion and imagery. 
There are three paths along which this work integrates itself into a user's experience. These paths are Situation, Duration and Participation.

Situation. In its final version DinnerTable will be placed in the highly coded social setting of the restaurant. It thus attaches itself to the framework of the restaurant experience and works as an event specific installation. The restaurant is a strongly typed social environment with known etiquette. The dining tradition is a well-defined ritual in the Western world. It is delicately variable in its details yet rigid in the sequence of events. Quests expect to be served and are often happy to accept recommendations from the Maître de service.  Dining adheres to formalized protocols, table manners and lack thereof are an integral part of the dining experience. DinnerTable functions as a commentator on unfolding events, a generator of stories and a passive onlooker. It is an uninvited quest but adheres to the codes of discreteness and exchange. It entangles itself into the dinner event and becomes oddly inspiring or obnoxiously intrusive.

Duration. Just as information can be efficiently encoded in dedicated data types, time can be more appropriately described in select time types. The rational for addressing this issue here is given by the fact that DinnerTable actively employs multiple notions of time to engage the users or to unobtrusively fall into quiet background mode. The idea of distinguishing typologies of time is not new. Bergson, for one, emphasized a duality of time. Starting from the Bergsonian notion of a distinction between quantitative discrete time and qualitative time-duration I add a third vector, that of machinic time. The resulting categories are as follows.
Oscillatory Time: This is discrete time in its purest form. It is the first principle of the quantitative time concept. It is embodied in but not equivalent to the periodic swing of the crystal quartz and atomic clocks. It is the notion of time that has enabled continued increases in processor speeds for computation devices in the last decades. Oscillatory time is cut and dry, arbitrarily fast and invariant in its repeatable precision. It is always maximum fast and is active (today) in realms beyond those of human perception.
Machinic Time: This time type is derived from oscillatory time but expands the first category into concrete applications. Machinic time is the task-based time of machinic execution. This can be as fundamental as the transistor's move from a high to a low output. Machinic time shows itself in the switching of a relay, the updating of a CRT screen or the meshing of gears in a gear train. This is the time type of loading variables into memory and of algorithm execution.  Machinic time spans a large range, from microseconds to seconds into the timeframe perceivable by human beings. It takes the guise of the electrical, electro-mechanical and purely mechanical. It is variable and open to design preferences. Machinic time is the time type scientists and engineers use to optimize a task. Furthermore, machinic time is accessible to the electronic arts. Artists work in the machinic time domain when they build a sensor that reacts to the touch of the user, when they chose to dissolve an image before loading a next one, when they design motors to move almost imperceptibly slow, or when they add delays to an algorithm to ensure a particular behavior of a machine does not evade a user's attention. Inversely, machinic time is employed when an algorithm is optimized to prevent its (graphic) output from appearing awkwardly delayed. Machinic time is an essential element in the toolbox of today's electronic artists. Machinic time is the interface to the intangible domain of the third time vector.
Perceptual Time: This is the time domain Bergson coined qualitative time. Perceptual time is both a function of the possibilities and limitations of our sensory organs as well as an intangible notion of multiplicity of conscious states. As such it is the antithesis of oscillatory time. It is a prolongation of the past into the future. It is duration. It is, as a time type, an intuitive measure and defies quantitative description. In sleep we live, by Bergson, pure duration. Through the idea of duration, perceptual time includes the notion of impatience. While it is culturally encoded perceptual time is a time type all human beings experience. It is the time domain in which human beings can return to an irrational state. It is the time type in which a work of art is appreciated. It includes the dwelling and delay necessary to appreciate complexity or the mind space of another human being. Perceptual time can not be manufactured as machinic time can. However, it can be enabled. Hakim Bey's idea of T.A.Z., a temporary autonomous zone, can be understood as such a perceptual time enabling circumstance. 
Through the intertwining of the narrative track with events occurring around the table, food, drink and more drink, the motion of the figures sliding across the board and the synchronized display of imagery, DinnerTable plays with the experience of perceptual time.

Participation. DinnerTable is a knowledge acquisition machine.  It collects audio and visual data from the dinner episode and uses this information to situate itself in between its users.  By virtue of its event specificity it can make recourse to the knowledge base on dinner ritual in order to disambiguate collected data. Physically and functionally it meshes into the exchange between the guests and their activities.  It is both the connecting link as well as a barrier between two dinner companions. 
Just as people distinguish between an intrusive stare and an attentive observation, surveillance technologies can manipulatively collect or selectively filter data (and discard results). DinnerTable employs traditional surveillance technology in an unorthodox fashion. All collected data is fed back into the experience system in a closed loop form. The closed loop observations are transformed and returned, reflected back to the user in the form of narratives spun by the table over the course of an evening spent with the machine. There is a cold form of intimacy that can evolve from this type of exchange. It is akin to the emotionally distant but attentively listening sympathetic stranger. 
The present states of speech recognition and image analysis limit the sophistication of the knowledge that can be collected by our machinic table.  It is conceivable that the future will allow us to create artworks that can fully and kindly participate in sophisticated forms of social exchange. The result could be called knowledge-based intimacy. DinnerTable is, in this regard, an anticipation of things to come. While the idea of knowledge-based intimacy generates anxiety in many people today, appreciation thereof may become an acquired taste in the future.