This essay explores the relationship between temporal alterity and audiovisual media, building on case analyses of select works in film, television series and video game. Sketching a notion of audiovisual windows and starting, among others, from Deleuze’s idea of cinematic time crystals, the paper designs a media culture theory of temporal alterity that is split between alienation (aesthetic experience of time) and absorption (anaesthetic experience of time). Central to this venture is an attempt to outline six fundamental forms of temporal otherness in audiovisual media while, on a thematic level, the ultimate quest for the absolute other of human time leads to imaginations of celestial phenomena like astral or angelic time and instruments of intertemporal communication like time portals.
