This research explores the relationship between computation and the temporality of things and their making. Temporality here is understood as change, transience, and transformation over time. Computation is commonly viewed as a process over time, and thus is naturally allied to temporality. How can digital, mechanical, or manual computation promote new ways of understanding and supporting the temporality of things, spaces, and their making?

In this research, I look beyond the purposeful design and programming of temporality into overtly temporal things and spaces – for example, kinetic, self-assembling, responsive, interactive things or spaces – to a more inclusive understanding of temporality as a fundamental and determinative quality of all things. The spatial aspects of things have been probed, formalized, and computed. What of their temporal aspects? How can the temporal nature of things be understood, formalized, and computed, and to what advantage?

Further, I consider the temporality of the making of things and spaces. Here, attention shifts to the temporality of human or nonhuman performance in making things, as opposed to the temporality of the thing itself. How can the temporality of the making actions to, with, or on things be understood, and formalized, and computed, and to what advantage?