A pair of slow clocks: one that stops when looked at, another submerged in gooey oil. Each loses momentum the more it labors. Dormant at first, a pulse can only be discerned if you give it time and listen closely.

Exhibited at the School for Poetic Computation. Featured in Creative Applications.

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A pair of slow clocks: one that stops when looked at, another submerged in gooey oil. Each loses momentum the more it labors. Dormant at first, a pulse can only be discerned if you give it time and listen closely.

Drawing from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ elegy to queer love in Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1997–90), Time Portraitures reconfigures “broken” timepieces as an expression of grief—one where time is an account of life, and all loss is political. How do we even begin to contend with the matrices of loss under capitalism? How do we measure the time they’ve extracted from us and our ecologies?

But perhaps there’s beauty to slowness. Consider this an anti-technology: a device designed to be unproductive, inconsumable. A shy clock that intimates its heartbeat only to those patient enough. It breathes new meaning into “keeping time”—keeping life, holding life, preserving life. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “where life is precious, life is precious.”

Exhibited at the School for Poetic Computation. Featured in Creative Applications.

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