This study examines the way in which contemporary artists address the dynamic conflict of time veering between time's progression and the immersion of time. Against the rises of digital technology and media that have seemingly conditioned us in the permanent "now" by ways of instant feedbacks, minute-by-minute news, etc, this research looks at how moving-images and art forms incorporate non-linear narratives and their viewers in such a participatory way that time is no longer seen limited to the present. It argues that the use of time-based media, with its capacity of reordering an individual's sense of time, orchestrates a kind of cinematic experience where one actively assembles mass encounters of everyday experiences, which contributes not only to the discourse of time, but, ultimately, to our "freedom."

Setting against the divide of the art of space and the art of time in the history of art, and drawing examples from a mixture of artistic expressions, this study is primarily a conceptualization of time in the context of moving-image installations and non-linear narratives. Five specific works ranging from visual art, sound, novel, film and architecture, including Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't, Janet Cardiff's Her Long Black Hair , Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Michael Haneke's Caché and Zaha Hadid's retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, are chosen as they facilitate an interaction between an individual and one's surroundings, all the while, mediating one's perceptions, remembrances and anticipations of what is to come.

With respect to aesthetic questions relating to temporality raised by those artworks, the study focuses on the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze who deal with the concepts of time, temporality and differences. In particular, it examines how the fluidity of time and the power of the involuntary thoughts have challenged how we construct knowledge and the comprehension of an individual, in terms of representation, subjectivity, the distinction between truth and fiction, etc. Equally as importance is Deleuze's analysis of the movement-images and the time-images that provides a theoretical framework uniquely exploring the cinematic experience, where open-ended durations and the rupture of time can affect one's renewed sense of understanding, consciousness, aesthetic insight and imagination.

Filled with intuition, memory and sensations, the temporal displacements evoke memory and a new sense of becoming. This research stresses that it is at time's hesitation, time's out-of-joint, when one's sense of time is ruptured from the existing order of things that one can regenerate the commitment to knowledge and to the creation of art. It is also then that education is no longer adhered by the existences and the rules or measured by expanding the depth or the breath of knowledge, but by the way in which one conjugates new forms or entities that would open up different ways of seeing the world beyond possibilities.