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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat procrustesing-time

Procrustesing Time

2024-03-28

The Procrustean bed offers a way to think about modern time. Rather than adapting a system to living beings, we cut and stretch living beings to fit the system.

Education makes this visible. Six years here, three years there, a prescribed curriculum across many subjects: a timetable designed for an average student who may not actually exist. A person’s strongest curiosity might lie in one or two areas, yet the system rewards consistently high performance across all of them.

We produce all-A students rather than necessarily cultivating singular interests. Those who readily follow the timetable benefit, while unusual abilities may appear as failures to keep pace. In the age of AI, I find this particularly troubling: we could be educating people into a general-purpose, machine-like competence while machines become better at precisely that competence.

A collaborative project has its own version of the problem. Its timetable arrives from outside. A good idea is useful if it happens to appear before the deadline; otherwise it may never enter the work. The schedule becomes the measure of thought rather than a condition to be negotiated with it.

Even spare time is treated this way. When an employee has a free interval, we assign another task instead of trusting that something might emerge from it. We do the same to students, friends and ourselves. We demand that unused time become productive according to an external scale.

Eventually we lose the ability to inhabit time without that instruction. I recognise this in myself. Faced with free time, I look for someone or something to organise it: a film, a queue, an attraction. I consume time because I no longer know what to do with my own.

What would it mean to resonate with a duration rather than fill it? Some people may pass through their lives without encountering that question.

The boldness of individuality is sacrificed when it fails to align with the system’s timetable. I suspect our learned habit of forcing time into prescribed forms contributes to that sacrifice. Space undergoes a similar treatment. In that sense, the whole spatiotemporal field of experience is placed on the Procrustean bed.

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