Time-Sites and Architectures of Temporal Locality

"I joined r/ClubPenguin and r/bannedfromclubpenguin in the quest to get this penguin somewhere on the canvas as a memorial...I woke up to see it...completely consumed by the Mona Lisa painting... we moved it to the right of the painting under He-man and it soon got consumed by Skeletor. After that, we moved it to the bottom right and had pretty much finished it when r/dragonballz started to build Goku on top of it...This was the start of the great Penguin vs. Goku War...propaganda posters were created to gather soldiers for the fight. I stayed up for hours defending the penguin...but we eventually all died off and went to sleep, which lost us the battle...We managed to get it up pretty fast on top of the then-abandoned Catalonia flag. When r/catalonia woke up and discovered this, they were angry and started to retaliate. We formed an alliance with r/thelastairbender and some people responsible for making the asexual flag and the heart above us." —u/wEbKiNz_FaN-xOxO

What is this complexity? What positions Catalonia next to Club Penguin next to the Mona Lisa?

Cartesian mapping, perspectival frameworks, and a reliance on euclidean space are no longer useful in visualizing and understanding virtual-physical geometries of connection. From video games to mobile phones, virtual interfaces connect across vast spatial distances, resulting in environments where an individual is "closer" to their friend who just texted from halfway across the world than they are to a person sitting in the room next door.

Building on a scholarly history of relational dynamics from Monads to Duration to Image Screens to Assembly Theory, by treating separation as a temporal metric, the architectural object is transformed from a discretely-bound spatial entity into a "time-object" — the set of environments, processes, and infrastructures which are close enough in time to participate in object formation.

Instead of precisely-bound spatial parcels, architectures of temporal locality stretch across scales while remaining discrete, map-able, and design-able. By mapping the "time-objects" that occupy these "time-sites", designers can construct connections, gaps, and hubs — defining a temporal geometry to structure their virtual-physical interventions.

This thesis takes r/place — an online 2 million pixel canvas where users can change the color of a pixel every 5 minutes — as its "time-object" of focus; documenting, mapping, and exploring its temporal forms. The canvas was witness to one of the largest battles humanity has ever seen, with over 4 million participants and 160 million pixel casualties, yet it has no memorial.

The memorial, as a prototypical architecture of temporal locality, takes form in thousands of small "nodes" attached to and intertwined with the same physical infrastructures as r/place. Users can interact with these nodes when in proximity through wifi, and changes occur to a virtual dataset through the same infrastructures as r/place.