Exploring Asynchronic Experiences – Seven Motifs: A Zettelkasten as (Filmic) Research Method

In order to investigate asynchronic experiences, the doctoral research project Face No Dial of a Clock explores life situations where contradictory rhythms, incommensurable temporalities, and unpredictable timings occur. Asynchronicities open up between subjective perceptions, affects, and collective time conventions. To observe states of asynchronicity, I have chosen several concrete “cases” where a personal account of time does not correspond necessarily with social chrononormative time concepts. The collected materials in these quests did mainly take form by filmic means such as documentary footage, staged displays, montage techniques and voice-over narration.

The present text draws on thinking processes which occur in the (re-)assemblages and (re-)configurations of the collected materials in my filmic practice. I relate my method to the Zettelkasten (slip box),¹ by which I tempt to evince, in a figurative sense, how this dealing with textual and filmic material provokes thinking processes. In seven motifs emerging from the filmic footage and montage effects, relations and reflections about the theoretical discourse on the present sense of time within acceleration, simultaneity and hyper-fragmentation are introduced. These seven motifs serve as prisms shedding light on the filmic thinking which evolves in the back and forth between participant observation, shooting decisions, editing and non-linear voice-over development. The kind of filmic thinking I develop through moving images and language has as its aim that embodied thinking contributes to new forms of knowledge about asynchronic experiences.