"In Time" or "Through Time"

I'm researching how to authentically represent our experience of time in three dimensions.

According to Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour in "Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People" people in the Western world order their memories - and their visions of the future - from left-to-right, with the biggest and brightest internal images closest to them.  As the memories and visions are throught of as being further away in time from us - either in the past, or in the future - the images become smaller and dimmer to us.

Organising our memories and visions in time

The images are organised that way because of the way we access memory - which is associated with eye movement - our language is ordered that way too. I was excited to read this - artists using holography have represented the passing of time from left-to-right - and I've linked that movement to the way that we read. I've wanted to produce a hologram or lenticular image which read in English from left-to-right with the arabic translation from right-to-left.  I haven't found a way to crack that technically yet. I've been inspired by Ibtisam Barakat - a friend and Palestinian Poet who had to teach me the history of Britain and Palenstine.  I wanted to link our different cultures with writing.

"I didn't know my own History" - written by Ibtisam Barakat

We in the West and East experience time differently.  Westerners are more likely to experience 'Through Time', while Easterners are more likely to experience time as 'In Time."

Through Time – Anglo European understanding of time – the business world relies on this ‘Time is Money’.   Time line goes from side-to-side.  The past is on one side and the future the other.  Both are visible in front of the person.   Through time people have a good understanding of linear time.  These people store their past as dissociated images.

Past                 Future

In Time – Arabic, or Eastern Time – living in the moment.  Appointment times more flexible.  The timeline stretches from front to back so that the future is in front of you and the past is behind you – you’d have to turn your head to see the past. 

   Future  

Past

I would like to work on merging these two ways of experiencing time, visually using holography and lenticular imaging.