The measuring of time produces anxiety when it serves to assign us to social tasks, but it makes us feel safe when it substantializes time and cuts it into slices like an object of consumption. Everybody knows from experience how intimate a ticking clock can make a place feel; the reason is that the clock’s sound assimilates the place to the inside of our own body. The clock is a mechanical heart that reassures us about our own heart^1.
^1 Baudrillard Jean, The System of Objects 1996
But what happens to us and to time when it is "on pause"? Does it still exist or is it suddenly "out" of time? Maybe it exists through the memory we have of it? Or maybe time only exists through the sequence, the experience, the performance we have of it.
From one person to another, the estimation of how much time is passing or has passed can carry a lot of variations. It is the proof that we are facing a material that our own experiences and feelings shape as they want, in (or from) which we all escape in our very own personal way. How has our relationship to time shifted with confinement measures at a world scale? How the pandemic and stay at home orders have suddenly started manipulating, distorting and cutting our time(s)? Through this "on pause" period, how is time cut, blended, diffracted? How is its discontinuity hitting our perception of reality? As time always seems to try exiting from itself, as it always seems to stop, interrupt, halt the time in order to escape its own mechanisms or clock, the magic of time is maybe hidden in the essence of time(s).
This digital space aims to act as a way to encapsulate or maybe fix our fragile notions of times; as a way to help us understand why we have the impression that time goes way beyond us and yet, always resonates very strongly with our bodies.