FULL-TIME
Bataille distinguishes between two types of play, strong and weak. In a society in which utility has become the dominant principle only weak play is deemed acceptable… Strong play, by contrast, cannot be reconciled with the principle of work and production. It puts life itself at risk. — Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals.
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.
In malformed spreadsheet rows and sterile documents tragedies become rotely taxonomized. Injuries are reduced to numeric codes, deaths span delimited columns, records are kept and aggregated agnostic to suffering or joy. The individual as datum is tracked with antiseptic precision, contorted into succinct categories and compressions, bleached of the essential violence contained in countless acts.
Spanning video, sound, interactive technology, and performance, FULL-TIME explores the brittle bio- and psychopolitics governing life and labor today. Applying numerous stochastic algorithms lurching towards machinic failure to both original footage and bureaucratic datasets, 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.
