Josephine Sales Total Running Time
Process archive
Josephine Sales is an artist working in time-based media, sculpture, and performance to consider the relational capacities of disability, dependency and debility. The archive page contains research that informs Total Running Time, guided by a disability oriented approach that treats images as indexical markers—evidence of how access is organized, withheld, or felt.
Archivist's statement
Sales selected just ten artifacts for her archive: images from her research that informed Total Running Time. Her minimal notes require the user to be creative and resourceful, making connections between these process artifacts and the final project. The archive concludes with an access experiment, TRT Site, an accessible digital companion to Sale’s exhibition. The site gathers research materials and interactive content, and invites self-paced exploration of the work’s themes as well as ongoing engagement with the work.
- 2023-2024
- Residency at Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine
Process Archive for Total Running Time
Central Time Clock
An image of the exterior door of “Central Time Clock,” a labor-time tracking device provider that boasts “helping effectively manage employees and control labor costs.”
Sketchbook 11, Sketch of Two Clocks, 1986 by Donald Rodney
An image of white text on a dark blue background with a white border. The text reads, “One clock is inscribed ‘Past’ and ‘Imperfect’. The other clock is inscribed ‘Future looks’”
Fourth Amendment AI
An image depicting a computer node map of 40 AI response choices around the Fourth Amendment.
Haptics in wall
A photo of a printed document titled “Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline'' next to a handwritten note which reads, “haptics into wall??” The note also has a small hand-drawing of a rectangle on it.
Ice Light
An image depicting six photographs laid out on a piece of wood. Each of the six photos show a large rectangular slab of ice in a sink and in front of a freezer. In the first two photographs, the ice slabs are illuminated by an orange light.
Mouser policy
A document outlining “Mouser Electronics” standards on slavery and human trafficking in the supply chain.
Power Generation
An image depicting the side of a tan-colored building with the text “Power Generation” written in black on its face.
![An image shows a video still with a solid gray background. Overlaid closed caption text, filled in yellow with a black outline, reads: “to refuse this call, press 2 [a slight crackle on the line].” This video is part of Total Running Time Site and represents another iteration of Pulses, exploring the interplay of captions and sound.](/img/derivatives/iiif/images/EAAT27/full/250,/0/default.jpg)
Pulses still
An image of a video still with a solid gray background. Closed caption text with a yellow fill and black outline reads “to refuse this call, press 2 [a slight crackle on the line]”.
Rescue material study
An image of a grey, smooth surface with a pile of grey powder and transparent, spherical beads in varying sizes. The beads appear to glow.
![An image shows a white document featuring six rough waveform illustrations arranged two across and three down. Each waveform corresponds to a distinct sound explored in Pulses, part of the installation Total Running Time. The sounds include: [thump], [breathing], [ringing] short pulses with left/right delay, [touchtone], [triggering] operator, and [constant] voice 1—offering a visual map of the work’s sonic textures and rhythms.](/img/derivatives/iiif/images/EAAT25_0/full/250,/0/default.jpg)
Sonic study
An image of a white document depicting six different illustrations- two wide by three tall. Each illustration depicts a rough waveform for a corresponding sound. The sounds are [thump], [breathing], [ringing] short pulses l/r delay, [touchtone], [triggering] operator, and [constant] voice 1.
Time shred
An image of the rear door of an 18-wheeler trailer on the road. Black printed text is obstructed by vertical frames. The text reads “Time Shred Services inc. Mobile Document Destruction, www.timeshred.com, 718 875-1200, 1800 989-8463”.
World
An image of a pale, off-white piece of sheet metal with decal residue spelling the word “world”. The metal’s screws line the left edge of the image.
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.
Biography
Josephine Sales is an artist working in time-based media, sculpture, and performance to consider the relational capacities of disability, dependency, and debility. Treating access as both material and method, Sales allows the viewer to shape how the work circulates, engages, or lingers by opening multiple points of entry. Sales’ work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kai Matsumiya; and The Shed. Recent engagements include an Artist in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts (2021–2023), and participation in E.A.A.T., Experiments in Art, Access and Technology at the Beall Center for Art + Technology. (2023-2024). Sales received an MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery School of the Arts and a BA in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College, and currently teaches in the School of Art, Media, and Technology (AMT) at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
Project Description
Total Running Time comprises four works that use disrupted social and sensorial gestures to examine the entanglement of incarceration, disability, labor, and the extraction of time. Across relief sculpture, a telephone call through the prison telecommunications system, and expanded cinema, Rescue, Pulses, and Day for Night stage crises of care, surveillance, and temporal disorientation. Total Running Time Site extends the installation as a digital sourcebook on loan to UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology, linking the physical works with a remote space for continued engagement.