Retrocurrences

An event whose influence or effect is not discrete and timebound–it extends in all possible directions and encompasses all possible time modes. We use retrocurrences to investigate how memory waves spread across time and space, reaching backward in time and forward in time, simultaneously, to include everything that has happened, could happen, could have happened, and will happen, and all the permutations therein. This dynamic event process takes on features and characteristics reminiscent of quantum matter, where time is reversible and information can flow in both directions, much like the flow of information within Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), and the layered and entangled temporalities etched upon Dana’s movement on the timeline as she travels back and forth between her home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation.