TEMPORALIZING

This paper proposes temporalizing as a critical visual operation in contemporary digital ecologies. Rather than treating time as an external, homogeneous flow (e.g., frame rate) against which environmental visualisations unfold, it argues that digital visual regimes actively produce time: engineering it through sampling intervals, prediction windows, buffering pipelines, and real-time rendering architectures. What appears as seamless liveness is in fact a composition of microtemporal delays, anticipations, and machinic rhythms—temporal operations fundamentally incommensurable with the uneven, discontinuous durations of more-than-human worlds.
Through cross-sectional case studies, the project examines how environmental visualisations—ranging from physically based rendering and real-time simulation/vision systems to operational dashboards and urban or climatic digital twins—encode ecological temporality within their operative logics. These systems stabilise environments not by depicting their temporal rhythms, but by temporalizing vision itself: smoothing discontinuities, enforcing synchrony, and folding speculative futures into an ever-operational present. In doing so, they privilege machinic microtemporality as the default ecology and treat visualisation as a perceptual infrastructure oriented toward humancentred operation, thereby subordinating non-aligned rhythms, multispecies durations, and environmental lag to computational cadence.
Approaching these systems through a media-ecological and posthuman temporal framework, the paper reframes digital ecological visualisation as a politics of time: a field in which engineered temporal regimes determine what becomes visible, legible, or actionable as ecology. Temporalizing thus reveals how visualisations do not simply record and represent environmental processes. They compose visibility through machinic rhythms that overwrite non-synchronous ecological durations. Rather than naturalising these reductions, the paper argues that attending to their incommensurabilities opens space for imagining visual practices capable of accommodating multiple, uneven, and more-than-human temporalities.