Maturity

Total Running Time Site

: : : , or ‘Maturity’, is the duration of a loan agreement between the artist, Josephine Sales, and the University of California, Irvine in the form of a countdown clock. The clock correlates with the average length of time it takes for a University of California student to complete an undergraduate degree. The clock asks what other things can be imagined and realized within this time frame?

Pulses

Pulses (stems)

Pulses (stems) or thirteen sounds from the sonic piece ‘Pulses’ are made available as isolated audio players.

Sounds include a mechanical ventilator, creaky braces, dial tones, phone operators, static fuzz, metronome patterns, a prison telecommunication disclosure announcement, vocal elocution exercises, a sine wave, an acapella version of ‘Unchained Melody,’ and an AI failing to define “care.”

breathing_sim

care_ai

creaky_braces

field_recording_relay_switchboard

fuzz01

fuzz02

metronome

operator_15m

perfect

phone_bell_southring

sine_wave

telephone_bell_piece

unchained_melody

Journal

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'Day for Night' is a cinematic technique used to simulate a night scene during daylight hours

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Clue,

Rhymes with excuse. Removing oneself from participating in a process due to a conflict of interest. A disqualifying bias or partial view.

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For Hyppolite, the absolute is not an achievement as such, but the dialectic of achievement and loss. [He] understands his own project less as a re-writing of Hegel than an elaboration of some underrepresented Hegelian themes [specifically] the interpretation of absolute knowledge as the thought of time

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glossary (or some words and their definitions)

empirical: based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.

- two-way glass

- focus groups

- interrogation

- surveillance

- voyeurism

- observation

speech acts: five illocutionary points that speakers can achieve on propositions in an utterance (Searle)

namely: the assertive, commissive, directive, declaratory and expressive illocutionary points

textual accumulation: the gathering of various creative items and narratives

fungibility: exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others (Hartman)

Black fungibility: treating the Black enslaved body as an open sign that can be arranged and rearranged for infinite kinds of use.

the Black fungible body and its sign can be made liquid, dust, and more. Per Spillers' and Hartman's accounts of the slippages occurring during the transit of exchanges...

“Black labor” tends to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor.

black life is not a static object of analysis (a black concept, a black body, a black community, a black idea) that is poised to be assessed, but rather a site (or sites) of sustained and/or provisional worldmaking activities that are invested in liberation (McKitterick)

Ambivalence (unresolved contradictions) is an important feature of black Atlantic livingness because it signals the working through and toward liberation. In my thinking here, contradiction and ambivalence open a cascade of signals and prompts, distinct modes of diasporic literacy that give form to black life. (McKitterick)

psycho-affective field; a field that pushes us to think not only about the proliferation of negative representations and misrepresentations of blackness, but also how we become psychically attached to, and invest in, this already-normally-always system of knowledge that cannot comprehend black humanity. (on Wynter)

“deciphering practice”—a reading practice that takes into account multiple social realities and differential psycho-affective fields while also exposing the intense weight of our governing system of knowledge. (on Wynter)

phantasm

a figment of the imagination; an illusion or apparition.

"the cart seemed to glide like a terrible phantasm"

ARCHAIC
an illusory likeness of something.
"every phantasm of a hope was quickly

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Two clocks illuminate the room, made of prepared 5K kellvin circadian optic light panels generically used to mimic sunshine. It runs on two security timers. Viwers are invited to experience the sunlight on two different timelines: the first, a constant 24-hour day, the second, once an hour

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Day for Night

‘Day for Night’ is a clock in the form of a color gradient that runs on 24-hour time. From the top of every hour until 44 minutes past, the edges maintain a warm, orange glow. For the final sixteen minutes of each hour, the edges are a pale, cool blue until fading back into the warm orange at the top of the hour. This clock corresponds to an on-site artwork titled, ‘Day for Night’ presented at Beall Center for Art + Technology on view from September 30th, 2023, to January 13th, 2024. The physical piece is an expanded cinema work comprised of two clocks illuminating the room, made of prepared 5K kelvin circadian optic light panels generically used to mimic sunshine. It runs on two security timers. Viewers are invited to experience sunlight on two different timelines: the first, a constant 24-hour day; the second, once an hour.

Library

The library is a shared resource that includes supplementary materials for remote engagement. The materials available span text, video, image, and sound. All downloadable texts have been processed with optical character recognition (OCR) optimized for screen reader users. The library is available to anyone with web browser access – which incarcerated human beings do not have. University of California, Irvine faculty, students, staff, and the general public are invited to consider the material conditions of those living through disablement from inside the prison walls, creating connections and supporting incarcerated human beings. Outside participants may engage the library in several ways, including organizing on-campus meetups, online reading groups, booking screenings, supporting direct actions, or redistribution drives. Audiences are invited to examine and expand on how disability may resist the state and structural violence of ableism / carceral institutions and their intersecting forms of oppression and co-optation. With the hope of finding ways to end this harsh form of punishment before the countdown clock reaches maturity.

A selection of supplementary resources spanning text, video, and image appears in white text on a black background. Highlighted items appear in yellow and are categorized by order, title, author/artist, year, and medium.
Title	Author / Artist	Year	Medium
Disablement, Prison, and Historical Segregation	Jean Stewart, Marta Russell	2001	Text
Disability Justice in the Age of Mass Incarceration	Talila A. Lewis	2021	Text
Death by Regulation	Russell Maroon Shoatz	2008	Text
People in Pain (Doing Time on Planet Earth)	Gretchen Bender	1988
Prognosis Time	Jasbir Puar	2009	Text
One Year Performance	Tehching Hsieh	1980	Performance
20 Minutes in April	Gary Beydler	1976	Film
Sketch of two clocks with annotation (Sketch #11)	Donald Rodney	1986	Drawing
Crippin' Jim Crow: Disability Dis-location and the School to Prison Pipeline	Nirmala Erevelles	2014	Text
Gean Moreno	Abolition Formats and Incompliance Aesthetics	2018
Immaterial Labor	Maurizio Lazzarato	1996	TextEssay
Are You Ready for Your Parole Hearing?	Kamal Fardan	2021	Text
Telephone Booth 905 1/2	Pedro Pietri	1979	Audio
Breakfast Starts at Midnight	Claire Fontaine	2011	Sculpture
I Thought I was Seeing Convicts	Harun Farocki	2000	FilmVideo
Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson	Susan Burch, Hannah Joyner	2007	Text
Rethinking “Aesthetics”: Notes Toward a Deciphering Practice	Sylvia Winter	1992	Text
Blue	Derek Jarman	1993	Film
Are Payphones Obsolete	Ian James Alexander	2021	Text
Telephone Thing	The Fall	1990	Video
Captive Minds: Captive minds? Psychoanalytic thought, politics, and hidden persuasion in the post-war ‘Free World.’	Daniel Pick, Ben Kafka	2022	Video
Prison Pandemic Project	University of California, Irvine	2020
Speech Tests	Daphne Oram	1961	Audio
From Victim to Victor: An Inquiry into Death by Incarceration, Gender, and Resistance in Pennsylvania	Abolitionist Law Center	2023	Text
The Body and the Archive	Alan Sekula	1986	Text
Shadow Work	Ivan Illich	1980	Text
Blue	Derek Jarman	1993	Text
Disablement, prison and historical segregation: 15 years later	Liat Ben-Moshe and Jean Stewart		Text
“Alexa, Do You Have Rights?”: Legal Issues Posed by Voice-Controlled Devices and the Data They Create	Eric Boughman, Sara Beth A.R. Kohut, David Sella-Villa, Michael V. Silvestro	2017	Text
Constructing the Carceral State	Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Heather Ann Thompson	2015	Text
Prison in Twelve Landscapes	Brett Story	2016	Film
No More Shackles: Why We Must End the Use of Electronic Monitors for People On Parole	Challenging E-Carceration project team: James Kilgore, Emmett Sanders and Myaisha Hayes	2019	Text
Threshhold	Malcolm Le Grice	1972	Film
Poetic Justice	Hollis Frampton	1972	Film
Understanding E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring, The Surveillance State and the Future of Mass Incarceration	James Kilgore	2022	Text
The Rise and Reach of Surveillance Technology	The Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability	2021	Text
The California Political Economy, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California	Ruth Wilson Gilmore	2007	Text
On Difference Without Separability	Denise Ferreira da Silva	2016	Text
Eyes to See With	Laura Marks	2009	Video
Contesting the Carceral State With Disability Frames: Challenges and Possibilities	Jamelia Morgan	2022	Text
Cage , 2009. Steel. Suspended on wall inside cage: fetish object with workboot scarification (Giuliani Time) , 2007. Terracotta, toilet plungers, graphite, epoxy, mica, wire. Back of cage: Yellow Stack , 2009. Unglazed stoneware fired in anagama kiln, epoxy, paint, automotive paint, cinderblock. On the floor inside cage: Containers , 2009. Porcelain, terracotta, glazes, lusters, graphite, unfired clay, plastic. Dimensions variable.	Simone Leigh	2009

Total Running Time Site

Total running time in cinematic terms refers to the duration of a moving image work, implying a beginning, middle, and end. This assumption of linear time draws on capitalist and ableist notions of productivity. Capitalism produces ‘disability’ through exclusion as a category with its own orientation to time and modes of production. What is a time that includes the expanses of illness or disability? What is a time that accounts for the duration within carceral institutions and premature loss due to state violence?

Within the exhibition format, ‘Total Running Time’ documents the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.

Total Running Time comprises four works

Rescue, an anagram of the word ‘secure,’ spans two walls in a 5-foot tall shallow plaster relief accompanied by two geometric forms large enough to sit on. Rescue invites viewers to contemplate their relationships to crisis and care.

Pulses is a fifteen-minute telephone call through the prison telecommunication system, the maximum length permitted for calls between an incarcerated person and the free world. The piece vibrates through transducers embedded within the wall. This tactile sonic arrangement is punctuated by periodic reminders that the telephone line is being surveilled and counts down the remaining call duration.

Day for Night, an expanded cinema work, is two clocks illuminating the room, made of prepared 5K kelvin circadian optic light panels generically used to mimic sunshine. It runs on two security timers. Viewers are invited to experience sunlight on two different timelines: the first, a constant 24-hour day; the second, once an hour.

Total Running Time Site is an auxiliary exhibition site and digital sourcebook available on loan to Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, for an extended period beyond the exhibition run. The site is available through the university domain and invites remote and site-specific engagement. Each work on the digital platform is a companion to artworks on view between September 30, 2023, and January 13, 2024.

Across these works, Total Running Time explores temporalities of care, abstracting the halted rhythms of the day and strictly controlled telecommunications for incarcerated people. Scrambled text, interrupted messages, light without the sun: using gestures of disrupted social and sensorial experience to interrogate the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.

Acknowledgements

Total Running Time is made alongside the care, thought, and generosity of many people, most crucially those whose lives are materially impacted by disability and the social condition of disablement through disciplinary sites that promote bodily and infrastructural debilitation through durative means, including long-term sentencing, life sentences without parole (LWOP), or death by incarceration (DBI), solitary confinement or “open air” prisons.

Deepest gratitude to Abolition Reading Circle, David Dawud Lee, Risa Puleo, Micah Giradeau, Cheryl Green, Alberto Lule, Constantina Zavitsanos, Park McArthur, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Carolyn Lazard, Jordan Lord, Mev Luna, Lateef McLeod, Alberto Rivera, Noam Keim, Dustin Gibson, Tyler Morse, Adelita Husni Bey, Amalle Dublon, Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Alexis Rowland, Keramet Reiter, Kaaryn Gustafson, Noam Shemtov, Lu Barnes-Lee, Teerath Majumder, Spencer Toler, Peter Goldberg, Lexi Welch, Bill Jenkins, Charli Muller, Miriam Simun, Jason Burns, Andy Montiel-Phillips, Crip Tech Incubator: Meesh Fradkin, Andy Slater, Olivia Ting, Carmen Papalia, Claudia Alick, Jason Lam Ground Works: Elizabeth McLain, Veronica Stanich, Luke Kudryashov, Stephanie Rosen, Ashley Shew, Daragh Byrne, Beall Center for Art+ Technology: Fatima Manalli, David Familian, Jesse C. Jackson and Leonardo, the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology: Vanessa Chang, Lindsey Dolich Felt for contributing to the realization of this installation.

Fiscal support provided by Leonardo | International Society for Arts, Science, and Technology, Beall Center for Art + Technology, a2ru | Ground Works, and Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UC Irvine.

Colophon

Total Running Time Site is the fourth work in the installation Total Running Time by Josephine Sales, presented at Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California Irvine September 30, 2023 - January 13, 2024

Site development was made with the generous support of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities a2ru and Daragh Byrne at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture.

The site is prepared as a Jekyll web application. It has dynamic components (for example, selecting a subset of posts for the front page). The site is currently housed on GitHub.

The site consists of a Jekyll repository that includes: markdown files for content, templates for HTML layout, CSS and JS files, media files including videos, images and PDFs that correspond to both components of the site and content that represents a research archive.

The data for the research library and some other site components are housed on Notion.

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Font: Atkinson Hyperlegible (headings), Cascadia (body) Font Size: screen responsive ~20px for mobile to ~40px for large monitors.