Sarah Hulsey
Somerville, MA
https://www.sarahhulsey.com
IG: @sarahmhulsey

Allochronologies
2024
Letterpress from monotype and foundry type, images printed relief from polymer plates
9.875″ x 6.25″ x 1.25″

Artist Statement

Allochronologies explores alternate notions of time, all conceivable according to the laws of science, that do not adhere to our ordinary experience. Many people have experienced a desire to know what might have happened, for good or ill, had they made a different decision at a critical juncture. I have become gripped by the idea of revisiting a point in my own past to see all the possible ramifications and outcomes of different choices. In the realm of fiction, there are many stories in which characters achieve this through “time travel.” But even more compelling are stories in which time itself does not operate in the familiar direction. Many of these stories line up in interesting ways with what physicists and philosophers of science think might be possible according to what is known about time and the universe.

Each volume of Allochronologies takes one kind of chronology and, using excerpts of fiction by some of the great 20th century writers, creates a book that physically embodies that conception of time. The theory of multiple universes is explored through a story-within-a-story by Jorge Luis Borges; an imagined novel is described in which nine different outcomes are possible depending on the path one chooses through a physical, thumb-index diagram of the plot. Or we may find that at the end of time, the cosmos collapses into a Big Crunch, before undergoing another Big Bang and “swinging back on itself,” as the central character in a story by Italo Calvino imagines; here that possibility is embodied in a volume that can be read cyclically within each opening, as well as identically from the beginning or end of the book. Lastly, a story by Alan Lightman in which time’s arrow runs in reverse—rotten fruit becomes ripe again, one can remember the past, people age in reverse—is explored in multiple backward-running versions: with the sentences reversed, the words reversed, and, mostly oddly, the sounds reversed, thereby enacting a reversal of entropy itself.

This book brings together stories that take elegant, esoteric scientific ideas about time from a selection of some of the more imaginative and inventive authors of the 20th century. By juxtaposing these differing stories and manifesting them physically in the way the books are manipulated and read, Allochronologies upends the usually linear order of books and suggests different ways of engaging with the idea of time itself as a function of reading.  Taken all together, these alternate chronologies let the mind wander freely, imagining counterfactual scenarios in which one could revisit (or at least an alternate version of oneself could revisit) points already lived and imagine alternative outcomes, alternative lives.

Excerpted texts include “April March” from “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain” by Jorge Luis Borges, (1941), translated by Andrew Hurley; “t zero” by Italo Calvino (1967), translated by William Weaver; and “2 June 1905” from Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman (1993).