Consider TIME:

All cultures and philosophies about the universe assume that time passes, perhaps at different rates of speed. An attractive aspect of multimedia, like film and radio, is the opportunity it provides to edit, transpose and transform this temporal sense into tailored dramatic cadences. Time on the screen is much removed from actuality; e.g. time-lapse photography compresses experience, slow-motion extends it.

Television drama is a fabrication, evoking events that never were in a time and place that never was. As in film editing, users experience 'real' time only for the duration of scenes, whereas by cutting and joining shots (or making links) we can radically abridge time.

Timing also refers to the speed that sequential images appear, or the time an interactive element remains on the screen. By editing time we seek to invest human and conceptual relationships with drama and meaning, expressed in terms of cause and effect.

TEMPORALITY: Historically, time has been thought of as an unstoppable linear progression, the flow that moves the universe. Increasingly however, time has taken on qualities of space, becoming a 'fourth-dimension' that is mappable, the implication being that perhaps, like space, time can be entered freely and traveled in more than one direction.

Musical composer John Cage creates temporal structures with sound. He introduced indeterminacy to the process of composition and performance. His Imaginary Landscape, No. 1 (1939) features an ensemble of performers, each of whom turns the dial on a radio for some period of time, waits for a period of time, then continues. The times for each were predetermined by a chance procedure.

In virtual reality, it is a visual presentation that develops over time. While the user may influence this process, it can proceed with or without user interaction. Media elements, which may be images or chunks of text, are added to the screen in a definite rhythm.

Digital media naturally affords this new ability to compose visual work that is temporal. Time itself becomes a form of information, meticulously recorded so that moments can be recreated, understood and relived at will. People, places, and cultures can be archived, and the archive itself becomes a new present, serving to establish connections between the past and the future, navigating within information while looking at a simulation of a 1000-year-old object.

Another feature of time in virtual reality is that information’s linear nature can be broken up, or seamlessly glued back together. For example, these notes you are reading happen to you during a real time experience, one subject after the other, but they were created hypertextually, and you will never know which were written first, therefore making time irrelevant.

LATENCY is an element of temporality that refers to the amount of time it takes for a unit of information to be delivered to the user; e.g. strike a note on a synthesizer keyboard, the sound builds from silence and fades away. A delayed response can create a sense of drama; e.g. the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) fades to invisibility, leaving only his grin, and then even that slowly fades as he's still talking.

Time itself can be an important carrier of information: we use it as meta-information to discern the direction from which data (for example sound) is coming from. In place of time-delays arising from the accidents of place, we could use time-delays as an analogue of other qualities; e.g. the remoteness of one idea (as embodied by an object, building, etc.) from another.

Even what is called 'REAL-TIME' interactivity is usually a fractured, 'unreal' version of time. We usually experience time in multimedia through the duration of pages or screens, which contain information or scenes. Computer software commonly supplies the user with visual indicators that show the status of functions in progress; e.g. download time-bars, hourglass symbols, countdowns.

The means by which time can be manipulated include:

• When the script refers to the duration and sequence of events, in the past, present and future.

• Assembly of images and sounds, fixing duration, rhythm and sequence in accord with scripts.

• The time within pages, shots or scenes can be recorded or distorted by technique and effects.

• When sounds (speech, music, effects) refer to events past, present or future.

• The degree to which time is modified by optical effects; e.g. reverse, slow-motion, looping, etc.

• The mode of presentation of the product to the user.