Nick Land - Time Spiral On Templexity, Looper, Architecture-_1

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  So we're gonna, we'll let Nick Lam speak and then we'll open it up to a conversation. Nick, what do you want to do with this? Just hang on to them a minute, there's only three things, so like five minutes and it's all just something that doesn't matter. Are you going to sit there? I want to see it. Is this working…

• 00:04:13

  Just really fast, three quick contextual elements. One of them is a show that was held at the Skyscraper Museum in New York in 2010. It was a big show. It's called China Prophecy Shanghai. Anna has actually written about it. There was also a review in the Wall Street Journal, which had, I thought, an interesting…

• 00:09:04

  And it's only with a certain crisis of that accepted sense of modernity and modernism that we're able to look back and excavate this Art Deco... ...modernity, which was happening, which was building things, which was reflecting a sensibility, which was defining modernity... ...but was not articulated in that high…

• 00:13:01

  Or between industrial and rural types of social organizations. Obviously, a time span of modernization is very important. A time spiral doesn't force you into that alternation. A time spiral is something that is simultaneously progressive and cyclical. So just quickly, one more thing on time spirals. Just to say that…

• 00:17:46

  John Harrison won the prize for the marine chronometer with a clock that was capable of losing, sorry, I should have written this day down, less than five seconds in, I don't know, so I might be a little bit off on this. I had a problem with my printer and I'm trying to remember this in my memory. Five seconds, I…

• 00:23:23

  straightforward exhaustion of a projected future through absorption into the present and then the past okay I really will shut up now my question really is one for both of you why architecture I mean why why is time and modern always decline you know Benjamin says that architecture is a mass meeting that is always…

• 00:28:31

  Um. I think this question lures us into such profound political incorrectness that I'm going to be very cautious about it. But I think Shanghai is the capital of a very distinctive world culture that is Chinese, maritime, cosmopolitan, commercially oriented, that is related very, very strongly to Hong Kong. Between…

• 00:35:30

  It's not going to happen you know Creative destruction is the way the future happens And so I wouldn't be too If we're talking about 2074 I wouldn't be thrown off of being by the fact that 2009 is 2012 is looking a bit gloomy I think we'll stop it there I'd like to thank Du Ling again for Amazing Thank you Thank…