Network of Time: Reading History Through Photographic Adjacency
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Network of Time is a work of electronic literature built from one simple rule: two people are connected when a real photograph shows them occupying the same place at the same moment. From this rule, the project constructs a continuously expanding map of human proximity stretching across the last 170 years. The talk introduces the piece by walking the audience through what it feels like to “read” a documentary archive made into a navigable narrative space.
The session begins with the foundational idea: photographs function not as illustrations but as narrative atoms. Each one establishes a factual link, and meaning emerges only when these links begin to chain together. The talk demonstrates this live by selecting two random figures from the 20,000+ people in the database and letting the system generate a short path between them. Each step becomes a short, self-contained fragment of nonfiction. The story is whatever accumulates as we move.
Midway through, the presentation shifts into Photo Odyssey, the project’s endless traversal mode. Here the database behaves almost like a dream: unpredictable but never invented, strange but always grounded in verifiable evidence. The audience watches as the network generates sequences no author could anticipate – moving from subcultures to governments to sports to dissident movements to internet personalities – held together only by the fact that the world once placed these people in the same frame.
The talk argues that Network of Time is not a visualization tool but a literary structure: a system where narrative arises from adjacency, constraint, and the sheer density of documented human encounter. No generative media is used; the work’s “fiction” comes entirely from the contours of recorded reality itself. What appears is a form of computational nonfiction that reveals how deeply, and oddly, everyone is already connected.
Network of Time: Reading History Through Photographic Adjacency
Narratives & Worlds
Network of Time is a work of electronic literature built from one simple rule: two people are connected when a real photograph shows them occupying the same place at the same moment. From this rule, the project constructs a continuously expanding map of human proximity stretching across the last 170 years. The talk introduces the piece by walking the audience through what it feels like to “read” a documentary archive made into a navigable narrative space.
The session begins with the foundational idea: photographs function not as illustrations but as narrative atoms. Each one establishes a factual link, and meaning emerges only when these links begin to chain together. The talk demonstrates this live by selecting two random figures from the 20,000+ people in the database and letting the system generate a short path between them. Each step becomes a short, self-contained fragment of nonfiction. The story is whatever accumulates as we move.
Midway through, the presentation shifts into Photo Odyssey, the project’s endless traversal mode. Here the database behaves almost like a dream: unpredictable but never invented, strange but always grounded in verifiable evidence. The audience watches as the network generates sequences no author could anticipate – moving from subcultures to governments to sports to dissident movements to internet personalities – held together only by the fact that the world once placed these people in the same frame.
The talk argues that Network of Time is not a visualization tool but a literary structure: a system where narrative arises from adjacency, constraint, and the sheer density of documented human encounter. No generative media is used; the work’s “fiction” comes entirely from the contours of recorded reality itself. What appears is a form of computational nonfiction that reveals how deeply, and oddly, everyone is already connected.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/narrativesandworlds/schedule/18
Bio
Jesse Ward is a Canadian artist, writer, and technologist whose work explores large-scale documentary systems, computational narrative, and the aesthetics of archival evidence.
He is the creator of Network of Time, an expansive web-based social graph built entirely from verifiable historical photographs, reframing biography and historiography through algorithmic traversal and emergent narrative.
His practice integrates digital humanities methods, conceptual art, and a background in investigative journalism, emphasizing human verification and factual rigor in an era of synthetic media.
Ward’s work has been featured on platforms including Kottke.org, Heise Online, and Morning Brew. He lives in Nova Scotia and works professionally in digital archiving. His musical comedy one-man show, The Fantastic One, won the Hot Ticket Award at the 2022 Halifax Fringe Festival and headlined the 2023 Portland Fringe Festival.