Contemporariness is “a matter of the relation between being, time, and space.” Contemporaneity is a particular experience of being in which people are moving through time, experiencing different temporalities, but recognizing a shared space. The term contemporaneity implies a sense of planetarity, or awareness of the planet as whole–with all its worlds and times–in the present moment.
Technologies of communication, mediation, and economy have shaped an interconnected world, and created ways of imagining the world. Understanding contemporaneity requires pushing the limits of this picture to include multiple realities, as they may exist in themselves, and not merely as aspects of technological and economic regimes.
Crisis is a significant part of the experience of contemporaneity. Economic, political, environmental, and social disruptions operate at different levels and different ways, annihilating the modern aspirations of periodization as a lineal succession of facts, while promoting both new recreations of the past and a future that appears unthinkable. This uncertainty and creates a vacuum that reveals the presence of a human community, poised to develop habits of coexistence among itself and with the environment.
coevality 