Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time

And, really, aren't we all? Take music. Not only does everything sound like everything else, the way we consume it in a random swirl juxtaposes Talking Heads with a cover of Talking Heads by Local Natives, and, really, is there a difference? Really, does it matter if there is?

I just read a piece by Bruce Sterling about atemporality in art. He talks about a shift in the perception of narrative and history from something that, when it was performed with pencil and paper, was a strictly linear journey, to something else, something that in a very real sense is, to use Vonnegut's immortal line, 'unstuck in time'.

Is it crazy to honour the people who got to an idea first? Or is it healthier to dwell on the finest examples of that idea? Does preferring a cover version to the original make me a bad person, and does it diminish the achievement of the original artist? Is it crazy to concoct, as so many people do with their fantastic imaginings of steam or 50's atom technology gone wild, futures which might have been? In a world where google makes the past, the present and the possible future equally accessable, I would say that these things are a normal reaction to our situation. Up until 10 years ago I was forced to consume culture in discrete, time-specific, chunks, as albums or books. Now I am not only able to consume media (read: knowledge) in chunks that have been placed next to each other with no respect for creator control, and still less for the context they were created in, I most often choose to do so.

Gone are the days where the artist or the scholar could dictate context for their work. There was a small furore over google banning a particular video which depicted artistic nudity from its Youtube service. It later overturned the decision, but can we fault them? The context is not there to split art from pornography, and increasingly that context does not even exist. Observe:


Now imagine it without the context. Are we reaching for a place where everything is offensive because context cannot be imagined at the time of creation? Or will people realise that they create their own context, and rule that nothing is offensive in and of itself, only when regarded that way?