Overview

In tandem with The Time Salon exhibition, Julie Louise Bacon will chair a discussion exploring changes in the experience of time in the Network Ages, featuring astrophysicist Associate Professor Sarah Brough, whose work is driving our understanding of how galaxies change with time, and Dr John Cass, a leading researcher in the field of time perception and psychophysics.

The boundaries of time are being pushed at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, reaching both into the enduring heavens and the fleeting individual experience of the present. Meanwhile technology, and the systems with which it is bound, seems to compress time lived in everyday life, in between. What are the implications of bringing such time perspectives together for the ways in which we scale and frame time, which in turn influences the way value is measured, our sense of interruption and alignment, the shaping of pathways forward and back?

The panel discussion will be followed by refreshments and a Saturday matinee screening of the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

Associate Professor Sarah Brough gained her Masters degree in Physics at the University of Liverpool and her PhD on the environmental dependence of galaxy evolution at Liverpool John Moores University. She was previously a post doctoral fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne and a research astronomer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory, Sydney. Sarah recently joined the School of Physics at UNSW Sydney. The majority of her research focuses on what role environment plays in how galaxies change with time. She is particularly interested in the most massive galaxies in the Universe, which represent the most extreme result of galaxy formation.

Dr John Cass is a senior research lecturer in the School of Social Sciences & Psychology at Western Sydney University. He uses psychophysical methods to investigate the brain mechanisms which determine human perceptual experience. Key to his research is the study of time: such questions as how do sensory processes evolve over time; what temporal information are we sensitive to; and how do we perceive time? Other research interests include developing technologies to improve visual function in age related macular degeneration and the perceptual integration of audio and visual information.