Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Martin Pawley’s The Time House (1968) was a study of the use of the latest monitoring technologies to provide a continuous record of individual experience within the domestic interior. Pawley argued that in the second half of the 20th century there was no authentic experience to be had in the public realm. As an antidote, he proposed ‘a retreat into a private world’ where individuals, with the use of technology, ‘can retain … a continuous and repayable record of time.’ Influenced by his readings of Heidegger and Sartre, Pawley aspired to facilitate a phenomenological recording of everyday life; the recording equipment in The Time House were to capture the totality of the experience of being. The aim was to create a house that could ‘listen, see, smell, touch, and remember’ which would provide the inhabitant with ‘a comprehensive, perhaps frightening, for the first time communicable image. A named, identified record of his being, his character, his personality.’ The value of looking back to this project today is this proposition of using technology to re-gain ‘authentic’ experience. Pawley suggests that the combination of present and past, real and virtual, subjective recollection and objective recording could create ‘a kind of existential stereophony’, triggering thus a true understanding of ourselves. Already in 1968, Pawley recognised that this is an alternative use of media and cybernetic technologies. But there, for him, lies the future of design.