ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a case for unscaling the times of Anthropocene phenomena, such as geological vastness, human agency and past, present and future climate disaster, through the conceptual liquefaction and blending of different time regimes provided by the works of Jean Epstein and Michel Serres. It does so by relating their intellectual concepts and reflections to the rise of electronics and computer-aided simulation. A scene in Epstein’s late film Le Tempestaire (1947), commingling mythical and modern practices of weather control, is analyzed as a primeval scene for the medial handover between time manipulating cinema and the model time of computer simulations. Instead of placing one knowledge practice over the other (the indigenous and local over the dominant and global, the scientific over the mythical, the human over the digital, etc.) the chapter argues for ways of seeing correspondence and continuity between them. It thereby follows the invitation extended by Serres and Epstein, who both theorized and celebrated what this chapter calls “time depth”: not a clash but a compositum of temporal scales that feeds off the abundance and thickness of variable, interconnected times that saturate the geosphere and anthroposphere. Today, when dangerously rapid climate change catapults the planet back into climates last seen millions of years ago, such time depth becomes a prerequisite, not just for sharpening our sensibilities for “deep time,” but also for acknowledging the generous productivity of myth, science and simulation in situating the human amid hybrid temporalities.
