Short entries on the interlocutors this essay and archive draw on. Where a name is cited elsewhere, the citation links here, to its entry.
His concept of duration (la durée) — time as lived and qualitative, indivisible, set against measured clock-time — underlies this project’s attention to the tempo of material change. Author of Creative Evolution (1907); awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.
His notion of the heterotopia, a space that hoards time outside the everyday, frames the museum in this essay; his analyses of power, discipline and the archive run beneath it.
A foundational figure in sound studies. His account of background noise as a relational field, and of listening as a form of agency and reorientation, informs this project’s treatment of the museum’s unheard sounds. Founder of Errant Bodies Press and artistic director of the Listening Academy, in two editions of which the author took part.
A philosopher of individuation and technology. His model of crystallisation — a seed or germ precipitating change in a supersaturated, metastable solution — gives this project a way to think transformation as something cultivated rather than imposed. A student of Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty, his work shaped Deleuze and Stiegler.
Professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her ecology of practices, her critique of the “coupling of profession and progress”, and her care of the possible underpin the essay’s account of counter-factual conservation. A leading reader of Whitehead.
The founder of process philosophy, in which reality is made of events and relations rather than fixed substances. His line that “life lurks in the interstices” closes the essay. Author of Process and Reality (1929); co-author, with Bertrand Russell, of Principia Mathematica.