notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, Jack Pierson, The End of The World, 2022, site-specific installation part of High Desert Test Sites on view through May 22, dimensions variable. Via. Bottom, screen captures from Avant que j’oublie (Before I forget), directed by Jacques Nolot, 2007. Via.

–

The economy of presence is not only relevant for people whose time is in demand and who could basically sell (or barter) more time than they have, but even more so to those that must  work multiple jobs in order to make a living or even not make a living. It is equally relevant to   those who coordinate a jumble of micro jobs, complete with the logistical nightmare of harmonising competing schedules and negotiating priorities, or that are on permanent standby in the hope that their time and presence will become exchangeable for something else eventually. The aura of unalienated, unmediated and precious presence depends on a temporal infrastructure that consists of fractured schedules and dysfunctional and collapsing  just-in-time economies in which people frantically try to figure out reverberating asychronicities and the continuous breakdown of riff raff timetables. It´s junktime, broken down, kaputt on any level.  Junktime is wrecked, discontinuous, distracted and runs on several parallel tracks.  If you tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if you even manage to be in two wrong places at the same wrong time it means you live within junktime. With junktime, any causal link is scattered. The end is before the beginning and the beginning was taken down for copyright violations. Anything in-between has been slashed because of budget cuts.  Junktime is the material base of the idea of pure unmediated endless presence.

Junktime is exhausted, interrupted, dulled by Ketamine, Lyrica, and corporate imagery. Junktime happens when information is not power, but comes as pain. Acceleration is yesterday´s delusion.  Today you find yourself crashed and failing. You try to occupy the square or bandwidth, but who is going to pick up the kid from school?  Junktime depends on velocity as in the lack thereof. It is time´s substitute: it´s a crash test dummy.

Hito Steyerl, from The Terror of Total Dasein, 2015. Watch.