There are some interesting art examples at the Incident web site, including some dealing with memory and time.
--from the exhibit notes:
THE DETAIL
Between the subject and the object, between the perceiver and the
perceived. As we shift from the detail to the entirety, the change in
scale is ascertained through comparison. Can a detail exist all by
itself? Would it still be a detail? Do we have to stop once we arrive at
the detail? Can't we just keep going until the detail breaks up into
endless fragments of further details?
We go from a human being to the body to the hand to the skin, the
material of the skin, to pigments, eventually are we even looking at
matter at all? The detail is a voyage of perception. What does
perception see in a detail? Does it reflect? Is one detail ever alone?
Once we reach the detail through this tortuous path of perception, don't
we actually find ourselves in an infinite multiplicity? If our
perception is shifting, doesn't this imply heterogeneity? How do we
decide what is revealed by the visible, and what we see, and how
relevant it is to us?
Today's technologies of memory also propose new ways of navigating,
travelling through memory, radicalizing the question of the detail and
of the other to which it necessarily refers. A detail is never alone,
and when it is, it is testament to its isolation, because it is missing
something. What is a detail on the Internet? How do we define a
hierarchy by which we can go from the detail to the whole or vice versa?
If it is hopeless to attempt to find anything which could be called 'the
final detail' which would complete our whole, how can we even begin to
speak of details?
Yet, we get the sense of never seeing anything more than fragmentary
details. The whole is a default, as is reason. As we go from one detail,
one perception to the next, we can stop, we may pause, but there is
never a good reason to. The world is disconnected.
The detail concerns aesthetics as much as it does thinking. The word
itself implies a hierarchy: a detail is something particular, an
ornament, nothing of importance, something which may even be on the edge
of nothingness. But it is also precision, sophistication, if not
subtlety. It is still part of something, a piece, a remnant. The detail
is not a concept.
Walter Benjamin described "a thought of detail": Let's remember this
garden, this grass, these blades of grass, each blade is unique and has
as much to do with the next blade as with anything else. It is through
the irremediable vulgarity of thinking that we perceive anything that
could be described as 'grass' forgetting the singularity of each detail.
How do interactive cross-referencing, database stratification, and the
capacity for unceasing movement of today's technology account for this
implied 'other' which is the aesthetic of details? Is it possible to
elaborate a perception of details which does not refer back, through the
sign of missing something, to an initial totality? A detail, but without
nostalgia.
Gregory Chatonsky