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Total Running Time Site
Total running time in cinematic terms refers to the duration of a moving image work, implying a beginning, middle, and end. This assumption of linear time draws on capitalist and ableist notions of productivity. Capitalism produces ‘disability’ through exclusion as a category with its own orientation to time and modes of production. What is a time that includes the expanses of illness or disability? What is a time that accounts for the duration within carceral institutions and premature loss due to state violence?
Within the exhibition format, ‘Total Running Time’ documents the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.
Total Running Time comprises 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. Each work on the digital platform is a companion to artworks on view between September 30, 2023, and January 13, 2024.
Across these works, 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: using gestures of disrupted social and sensorial experience to interrogate the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.
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