FULL-TIME
FULL-TIME is an installation and performance in three acts.
In a society of production the individual becomes an instrument of capital. Our physical and psychic labors often constitute senseless acts, divorced from immanent human meaning, in service of an abstract and disembodied logic that presents itself as inevitable. Our bodies erode from these repetitive motions, become defined by the acts they perform, the value these acts yield. Even outside the sphere of work we orient our actions, values, and leisure activities through a lens of logic and utility. What is sovereignty outside the mandate of value?
In The Accursed Share Volumes II & III Georges Bataille frames sovereignty as absolute freedom, the individual exercising agency through choices that reject purpose, reason, justification. In its place now exists “a new kind of subordination which masquerades as freedom” as Byung-Chul Han describes in The Disappearance of Rituals, a form of weak play in which “the neoliberal subject of performance voluntarily exploits itself.” In contrast to this weak play occurring within the sanctioned bounds of activity that facilitates productive ends, strong play “cannot be reconciled with the principle of work and production. It puts life itself at risk.” Strong play embraces the destructive, the unknown, and the uncontrollable. It defies expectation, assumes chance, and delights in surprise. In this framework the most complete form of play is to choose death.
Spanning video, sound, interactive technology, and performance, FULL-TIME explores the brittle bio- and psychopolitics governing life and labor today. Applying numerous stochastic algorithms to both original footage and bureaucratic datasets that reduce human loss to malformed spreadsheet rows, FULL-TIME charts the collapses already underway and the unknown states that might follow.
FULL-TIME was created with sound artist Estlin Usher as part of ongoing audiovisual collaboration Post Consumer Material. It premiered as part of the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theatre (CLEAT) Series at Elastic Arts incorporating 16 spatialized audio channels, using a system of omni-directional Hemisphere speakers conceived and built by Isobel Audio.
