Total Running Time, Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, September 30, 2023 - January 13, 2024
On this page is the reverse side of an 18-inch by 24-inch takeaway that includes fragments of black text and illustrations on white paper with an ice-blue gradient.
The drawings include a leg, an arm, and a clock with the letters NO (ON) in the place of numbers.
The text is as follows:
Total Running Time is an art installation comprising four works,
Rescue, an anagram of the word ‘secure,’ spans two walls in a 5-foot tall shallow plaster relief accompanied by two geometric forms large enough to sit on. Rescue invites viewers to contemplate their relationships to crisis and care.
Pulses is a fifteen-minute telephone call through the prison telecommunication system, the maximum length permitted for calls between an incarcerated person and the “free world.” The piece vibrates through transducers embedded within the wall. This tactile sonic arrangement is punctuated by periodic reminders that the telephone line is being surveilled and counts down the remaining call duration.
Day for Night, an expanded cinema work, is two clocks illuminating the room, made of prepared 5K kelvin circadian optic light panels generically used to mimic sunshine. It runs on two security timers. Viewers are invited to experience sunlight on two different timelines: the first, a constant 24-hour day; the second, once an hour.
Total Running Time Site is an auxiliary exhibition site and digital sourcebook available on loan to Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, for an extended period beyond the exhibition run. The site is available through the university domain and invites remote and site-specific engagement.
Total Running Time explores temporalities of care, abstracting the halted rhythms of the day and strictly controlled telecommunications for incarcerated people. Scrambled text, interrupted messages, light without the sun: Total Running Time uses these gestures of disrupted social and sensorial experience to interrogate the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.
This is an artwork,
a series of artworks,
a series of living artworks,
a series of disabled living artworks,
a series of disabled living artworks that are organized around time,
a series of disabled living artworks that are organized around time’s relationship to labor.
Total running time, in cinematic terms, refers to the duration of a moving image work, implying that there is a beginning, middle and end.
To Descartes the body was a machine: To the Industrialist, individuals bodies were valued for their ability to function like machines. As human beings were gathered into the “satanic mills” (William Blake) to accomplish the task of capital accumulation impediments were erected to disabled peoples survival. New enforced factory discipline timekeeping and production norms worked against a slower more self determined and flexible work pattern into which many disabled people had been integrated. (Marta Russell citing J. Ryan and F. Thomas The Politics of Mental Handicap (1980))
If disabled people are excluded from the discipline time keeping and production norms of the factory, the office building, the school, the mine, the warehouse, the road; where do disabled people or people living with impairments belong in the realm of capitalist modes of production?
What is a kind of time that unfolds, unfurls, uncoils, loosens, undoes, spreads out, stretches, extends, displays, deploys, disentangles without solving, settling, arranging, regulating, adjusting developing, setting forth, exhibiting, explaining…?
This is how the song goes, at least one section, several minutes in.
Hello?
[street cleaner sweeps past,
phones ring, dial tones ring out]
Hello?
Would you like to place a call? Hold please.
[ringing, dial tones,
a siren blasts through the ever-present rush of traffic]
Hello? Would you like to make a call?
Hello?!
[ringing drowns out the voices,
traffic is relentless, emergency vehicle nears]
Would you like to make a call?
Hello?!
[silence and stillness]
[blippy ringtone]
[blippy ringtone]
[blippy ringtone, line connects]
PRE-RECORDED SYNTHESIZED VOICE: you have a call from the state correctional institution with a call from an incarcerated human being.
to accept this free call, press 1.
to refuse this free call, press 2.
[a slight crackle on the line]
if you would like to permanently block your number from receiving calls from this facility, press 6. [light crackle and static]
[phone touch tone with a clipped “oh”]
[background static hisses steadily as an improvised, syncopated melody emerges from everyday sounds]
[tinkering with a small bell]
clipped “oh”
[door hinge creaks and plinks]
clipped “oh”
[various clinks and plinks interspersed with clipped “oh” and more clacks and taps]
[footsteps in clacky shoes mixes into the music of clicks, clacks, clipped “oh,” and taps]
[sounds above begin to align, forming a steadier rhythm, all continue with the addition of more]
Day for Night, Text Score
Two optical light units, generically used to mimic sunshine are situated side by side. Their intended use is to increase physical energy levels-- the most optimal disposition for work. Each unit is built with two 5,000 Kelvin bulbs, running on automated security timers. The optical light unit on the left runs on 24 hour time, beginning at 12am, at a constant speed, emitting a warm, amber glow. The optical light unit on the right runs once an hour for 15 min with a 1-minute buffer time, in the final quarter of each hour emitting a cool, white light.
[Warm light]
12:00am - 01:00am Warm light on
01:00am - 02:00am Warm light on
02:00am - 03:00am Warm light on
03:00am - 04:00am Warm light on
04:00am - 05:00am Warm light on
05:00am - 06:00am Warm light on
06:00am - 07:00am Warm light on
07:00am - 08:00am Warm light on
08:00am - 09:00am Warm light on
09:00am - 10:00am Warm light on
10:00am - 11:00am Warm light on
11:00am - 12:00pm Warm light on
12:00pm - 01:00pm Warm light on
01:00pm - 02:00pm Warm light on
02:00pm - 03:00pm Warm light on
03:00pm - 04:00pm Warm light on
04:00pm - 05:00pm Warm light on
05:00pm - 06:00pm Warm light on
06:00pm - 07:00pm Warm light on
07:00pm - 08:00pm Warm light on
08:00pm - 09:00pm Warm light on
09:00pm - 10:00pm Warm light on
10:00pm - 11:00pm Warm light on
11:00pm - 12:00am Warm light on
[Cool light]
12:44am - 01:00am Cool light on; off
01:44am - 02:00am Cool light on; off
02:44am - 03:00am Cool light on; off
03:44am - 04:00am Cool light on; off
04:44am - 05:00am Cool light on; off
05:44am - 06:00am Cool light on; off
06:44am - 07:00am Cool light on; off
07:44am - 08:00am Cool light on; off
08:44am - 09:00am Cool light on; off
09:44am - 10:00am Cool light on; off
10:44am - 11:00am Cool light on; off
11:44am - 12:00pm Cool light on; off
12:44pm - 01:00pm Cool light on; off
01:44pm - 02:00pm Cool light on; off
02:44pm - 03:00pm Cool light on; off
03:44pm - 04:00pm Cool light on; off
04:44pm - 05:00pm Cool light on; off
05:44pm - 06:00pm Cool light on; off
06:44pm - 07:00pm Cool light on; off
07:44pm - 08:00pm Cool light on; off
08:44pm - 09:00pm Cool light on; off
09:44pm - 10:00pm Cool light on; off
10:44pm - 11:00pm Cool light on; off
11:44pm - 12:00am Cool light on; off