Time is Queer, Time is a Quest

A race of benevolent and powerful gay extraterrestrials, known as the Chronarians, have left a series of cryptic sonic transmissions in order to re-educate humans how to use The Gift.

The Chronarians live primarily on planet Teleolus, but travel the galaxy widely. In fact, they are both the ancestors and descendants of humankind, because time is a loop.

Hard as it may be to imagine now, there was once a time before time on Earth - what the Chronarians call BCE, or the Before Clock Era. Humanity was in an ethereal, constant present. Each instant was indistinguishable from the next.

In what they believed at the time to be benevolence, our Chronarian ancestor-descendants intervened to give us The Gift: they untethered us from the eternal now, giving us history, distance, and memory. Unfortunately, armed with this knowledge and capability, humans became lost, and proceeded to create a great scourge on the earth, now known as Capital. Instead of improving people’s lives, it hollowed out every social good for itself and left mechanical hands pointing to and controlling everything. In the process, we forsook the gifts we had taken for granted in our perpetual present.

Watching from afar, the Chronarians debated on social media about whether to return to save us, their descendant-ancestors, from the crisis that was unfolding. Many argued that the we should be left to deal with our own mess. Others opined that the great scourge of Capital could be construed as a new era in human history which, being wrought as it had by the arrival of The Gift of Time, was now the Tempocene, in which The Gift was the primary agent impacting nature. Others disagreed that this name was not specific enough to capture the impact that The Gift was having, and called each other out for perceived slights and academic oversights. They debated for many centuries.

Finally, in the Earth year 2000 CE, the Chronarians received a beacon call from their beast-based monitoring device that it was time to return. Its sensors had detected that societal “clock drift” had reached unacceptable levels, and signaled that humanity was in need of recalibration.

This was enough to cut through the sectarian bickering and meme wars. Presently, a small team of anthropolochronologists fired up their spacetime tunneling vessel and embarked from their station on Teleolus.

The journey should only have taken a few minutes, as Chronarians are generally relatively capable spacetime travelers and Teleolus is not far away, galactically speaking. Unfortunately, they did not arrive until 2024, because the ship’s internal clock had been miscalibrated and thus they made several unnecessary loops in the Chronosphere en route.

You may have experienced several of the Chronarians’ Earthly interventions earlier this summer, in the form of interactive performances Time is Queer, Time is a Quavering on June 15th and Time is Queer, Time is a Quackery on July 27th, both here in Portland. We understand now that these events were designed to prime humanity for the revelations they bequeathed in their final cryptic transmissions which are our subject today.

The first event, Time is a Quavering, tested the resolve of challengers to complete a series of pointless tasks to reach a middling reward. In doing so, the human participants verified to the Chronarians that they were indeed in dire need of assistance.

The second event, Time is a Quackery, took a different approach, asking marchgoers to celebrate queerness and creative expression. The Chronarians were pleased to observe that fragments of the spirit of the eternal now still remained in their human subjects.

Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned delay, the Chronarian crew was now late for another interplanetary engagement, so they could not be present for this third and final event in the Time is Queer series. All we have are the artifacts they left behind.

Speaking of artifacts, you will see the four cylindrical worm cores from their ship across the street from Beast4D, the second stop on our walk today. They were precisely calibrated to create a wormhole to this specific spot, though as mentioned earlier a clerical error caused an unfortunate twist in the resultant spacetime warp. Not to worry– we’re told the intern responsible has been given a tedious assignment that they will never be able to complete, a common punishment on Teleolus. We’re not entirely sure how the Chronarians were able to leave Earth without their ship’s worm cores, but then again, there is much we do not yet understand about them.

Anyhow, the Chronarians’ mission on Earth was to re-educate humanity about the queerness of time and how to use The Gift. To do so, they left a series of cryptic transmissions, each corresponding to a site near their landing area. Fortunately, with help from a group of talented local artists, we were able to transmute each transmission into the range of human hearing. Now it’s up to you to decipher them. As you listen, let The Gift become you…