John Menick

This morning an entry on the Athanasius Kircher Society’s blog jogged a few memories. The post concerns a Web site advocating for a 28-hour day, and some experiments conducted at Harvard and the Mars Exploration Rover project on the human ability to live on non-standard time, two projects very similar to Giving Time, a work I did for the 2000 Greater New York show at PS1. Giving Time consisted of a watch that ran consistently slow so that two normal cycles of the hour hand around a watch face took 28 hours instead of the normal 24. PS1 gave each artist an email associated with the show in an effort to encourage discussion between artists and their public, and posted that email on artist’s title card. Since my watch was to be lived on by members of the public, the email was a perfect opportunity to meet people who thought about living on non-standard forms of time. The 28-hour society mentioned above was one of the respondents.

Of course interest in participating and actually having the time to participate are two separate things. Living on non-standard time implies that one has few pressing responsibilities, or at least the ability to avoid those responsibilities. Most people I talked with mentioned how attractive the idea seemed to them, but how they could never quite get around to taking that week off or changing their daily routines. The Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti agreed to live on the watch for a week, and although the experiment only ended up lasting a few days, he produced a very interesting audio diary during the time he struggled with rearranging his entire life around the impossibly demanding timepiece.

Since making the work, I learned that a number of people lived on non-standard time. Harald Szeemann once told me that Lamont Young lived on a 26- or 28-hour day. As I mentioned in an interview with the artist Pia Lindman, scientist Mitchell Feigenbaum experimented with 26-hour days while living on a research grant at Los Alamos. And as the Mars Rover project suggests, astronauts also experience extended and compressed forms of time, as do long-distance pilots and truckers.

Anyway, an unfinished story. Right now my attention is on other projects, but this things like this diary have piqued my interest again.