Flow As An Operative Methodology

Authors: Stefano Romano
Affiliation: POLIS University

Time has always fascinated men for its (apparently) inviolable structure and for the poetic dimension that this concept brings with it. During the history of civilization, time has been a crucial concept to understanding reality. At the beginning of the Twentieth century, thanks to the scientific discoveries, above all, Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory, the notion of time became an important element also for science for understanding the structure of the universe. The continuous and ever-faster scientific discoveries have also dissolved the linearity of time and its very nature, offering new possibilities to rethink space-time, as a series of connected, but not necessarily linear, events. Something we are experiencing today through the multi-temporality of the digital world, but which at the same time also shifts our way of perceiving physical reality.Everything we do and produce is inevitably part of a space-time dimension. We can therefore interpret time - also - as a distinctive structural element of the things that human beings build, whether small or large, from tools to metropolises.In this background, it is very interesting to understand how time works in two of the most symbolic categories of objects of human creation, art, and architecture, focusing more specifically on the category of art in public space. The time that works into the artwork is naturally different from the time that works into architecture, that is, observing art in public space, there are two different times that overlap, or rather the architectural space (and time) houses inside of it, the space (and time) of the work of art. The overlapping of these two different times, inevitably creates a third time, that we will call a “Time of Intersection”, which becomes the subject of this paper.