Act I: Records of time
Act II: Keeping time
Act III: Moving time
Monday, 9am. Weekly report available.
Your screen time was up 32% last week, for an average of 3 hours,
44 minutes a day.
Time Doctor, Timely, My Hours, Desk Time, Hourly, Harvest, Rescue Time, Tyme, Time Camp. Clocking in and out. Remember: Time is money!
SELLING TIME
In 1916, Ethel Cain, the speaking clock, won the Golden Voice Contest to become the first woman transmitting time via the telephone. With this achievement, she became the new time lady, replacing Ruth Belville, who had sold time to a select group of customers throughout her life. Belville had inherited the business from her father, an employee of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Until the late 1930s, she would synchronize her watch, Arnold, with Greenwich Standard Time displayed in the observatory's entrance hall and then go on to sell this information to businesses and individual subscribers in London.
TIME WILL TELL
Time is the most used noun in the English language, and many argue that clocks don't tell time; they produce it. They have become the very thing they were meant to represent.
Clock time, we believe, reflects some form of absolute and true time monitored by scientists around the globe. In Western education, we're taught that the time in our clocks is determined by the Earth's rotation and the sun's movement across the sky. According to this narrative, the Earth completes one orbit around the sun in 365 days, defining our year, and rotates on its axis every 24 hours, signifying our day. Consequently, an hour represents 1/24 of this rotational period, a minute is 1/60 of an hour, and a second is 1/60 of a minute. Boom! Beautiful numbers, divine perfection. But wait…
The Earth isn't a perfect sphere with flawless motion; it's an uneven, lumpy, wobbly, slightly squashed mass that experiences fluctuations. Its rotation doesn't precisely align with 24 hours each day, nor does its orbit around the sun consistently span 365 days each year. The truth is, the Earth's rhythms are more nuanced and varied than our neat calculations suggest. It's wishful thinking. Precise time is human-made. It's artificial. It's science fiction!
KILLING TIME
In 1884, clock time took over the world. The globe was sliced into 24 time zones, all synchronized with and derived from GMT, the time of the British Empire. The Western separation of clock time from natural phenomena or rhythms enabled imperialists to establish dominance over other cultures. In regions where globally standardized time is enforced, resistance still exists, as seen in China, where the entire nation adheres to a single time zone known as BST (Beijing Standard Time). However, in Xinjiang, approximately 2,000 miles west of Beijing, the imposition of BST leads to peculiarities, such as the sun occasionally setting at midnight according to this time standard. In response, many Uighur communities in the region use their own form of local solar time instead.
In Aboriginal communities, time is perceived differently. Rather than a linear progression, time is often understood as cyclical, intertwined with the natural world and the spiritual realm. Events are marked by natural phenomena like the changing seasons, the migration of animals, or the blooming of certain plants. Traditional ceremonies and rituals further emphasize the fluidity of time, with elders passing down stories and knowledge across generations, creating a timeless connection to the past and future. There is no word for time. Time equals place.
LOST TIME
Time can only be stolen if you believe it's yours. While smoking their cigars, the Gray Gentlemen probably advised you to put your time in the timesaving bank (or track it with the Hourly app).
In the seminar LOST TRACK OF TIME, we will research, compile, test, observe, build, perform and investigate alternative notions of time. We’ll abandon chronos and befriend kairos, who is unstable, messy, and alive.