Thus perception, and, in general, the sensory actions of a human, become temporal as they tap into the virtual; sensory actions are a process that emerges from an assemblage of presentational immediacy, affect, and memory-images. Extrapolating from Bergson, I propose that the interactive relationship with a digital system is never constituted solely by the present act of manipulating an interface or critical interpretations passed at the level of the screen. The relationship is instead constituted by the lingering effect of the past in the present, felt as both Bergson’s memory-images and also as the digital and physical occasions of interaction affect our perception of images in the present. The present moment of interaction is thus constituted by memory-images as well as the software and hardware processes embedded in the digital encounter. The human user is temporal in regards to his or her sensory activities but also temporalized as he or she comes into contact with the multi-temporality of digital systems.
This is the main point of the temporal theory produced by Whitehead, Deleuze, and Serres: that time is not linear. It is a coexistence of past and future within the present, as a virtual side of the present.
—Timothy Scott Barker, Time And The Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time (2012), p. 63.
