Heterochronia

The Hypothetical Development Organization, founded in 2010, is dedicated to the recognition and extension of a new form of urban storytelling. 

Members of this organization begin the narrative process by examining city neighborhoods and commercial districts for compelling structures that appear to have fallen into disuse —“hidden gems” of the built environment. In varying states of repair, these buildings suggest only stories about the past, not the future. 

As a public service, H.D.O. invents a hypothetical future for each selected structure. Unlike a traditional, reality-based developer, however, our organization is not bound by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics. In our view, plausibility is a creative dead end. That is to say: We are not trying to fool anybody. 

H.D.O. creates convincing renderings of these imagined future uses. These renderings are, in the tradition of the form, printed onto large signs, and shared with the public in general. Each structure selected by H.D.O. will, for a time, present to the world the fascinating potential future we have invented. 

Also, we’ll show the works in a gallery, for the benefit of interested parties with busy schedules.

The Hypothetical Development Organization will unveil its debut collection in December 2010, in New Orleans, LA. 

Members of the Hypothetical Development Organization come from a variety of fields, such as photography, architecture, journalism, publishing, and design. However, this project is a labor of love. It is a new form of fiction. But also, it’s real.

About the Hypothetical Development Organization

This article is a study of the motif of the mysterious shift of time that is found in a number of medieval romances. This shift occurs when, for example, a hero is confronted with the discovery that he has spent years in an unfamiliar place, when in his own experience the lapse of time seems incomparably smaller. This peculiar motif suggests that there is not one ‘universal’ currency of time but different temporalities, often linked to different places, which are termed ‘heterochronias’. The motif is widespread in Celtic legends, and critics have argued that the motif originated here, with the result that the occurrence of the motif in other types of texts has been neglected. We also find it in a group of romances: the fifteenth-century Middle English The Romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, and the twelfth-century Old French lay Guingamor and Latin romances Historia Meriadoci and the story of King Herla in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium. It is argued that these medieval texts feature ‘heterochronic’ worlds that run parallel with the normal worlds, with inhabitants who exist ‘beyond time’, which creates the possibility of a different perspective (aesthetic and didactic) from which to regard the normal world.

Whatever Egypt is to become now, the Library of Alexandria is surely an essential beacon by which to guide it—in this city where the ancient world’s most powerful lighthouse, the Pharos, once blazed forth (its pink granite pieces are still immured in the scenic Qaitbey Fortress). The Library is not only a national—and international—symbol of civility, but also a safe refuge for private thoughts. From the moment it opened eight years ago, young Egyptians have crowded into its eight levels, all eight sharing a single roof—a place where solitary contemplation lives in evident harmony with collective will. As these same young people now stand guard over their library in these difficult but hopeful days (along with Dr. Serageldin, who remains at his post), they are in fact standing guard for all of us.

12 July– 12 October 2008, Australian Cinémathèque and Media Gallery, GoMA

A rich vein of contemporary artistic practice revaluates the utopian dreams of the modern period. ‘Modern Ruin’ brings together artists and filmmakers who look back to modern art, architecture and design in order to visually and critically explore their historical failures. The profusion of recent images of modern ruins in art and film can be seen both as a response to particular physical and aesthetic qualities, and also as a metaphor for loss. The works in the exhibition and film program speak of living in the ruins of Modernism; some translate a mood of disappointment while others are imbued with a melancholy sense of dreams half-remembered. They examine the decay, detritus and self-effacing survivals of historical modernity.

Ruination is the shadow of progress and utopian thinking. From the Enlightenment, the idea of the modern was associated with the creation of new bodies of knowledge, with progress and the perfection of self and society. Modernity came to signify industrialisation and urbanisation from the second half of the nineteenth century. Modernism as a movement in art, literature, architecture and design, is associated with the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, with radical innovation and the creation of new languages.

The contemporary landscape of art and film is littered with ruins, palimpsests of creation, form and disintegration. A return by artists and filmmakers to Modernism’s purified forms and autonomous objects represents an attempt to imagine new meanings for them. The forms of the past emerge at particular times, sometimes as fragments or ruins. The question is how to decipher these fragments to create constellations of meaning that move between past, present and future.