In Search of Personalized Time is an attempt to live unreal time in real-time world.

The contemporary world operates in terms of global synchronization. From global finance, to cloud-based data storage, to the many day-to-day functions of the smartphone, we live in an era where the semblance of simultaneity is a defining characteristic of value.

Popular perceptions of time have often been based in the idea that it is a fixed medium in which events take place, rather than a dynamic contributing factor to those events. In this view, first formalized as “Absolute Time” by Isaac Newton, time is reduced to the backdrop for all that happens: homogeneous, unchanging, and holding supremacy over objects and space.

Today’s technologies accelerate this belief, and its ubiquity often masks it from questioning. As this perspective gains dominance, human experience as it is quantified gains currency at the expense of human experience as it is felt.

With In Search of Personalized Time, we endeavor to shift the tides of global synchronization. We are setting out to leverage subjective temporal perception against master time, facilitating a multitude of flows of time rather than bolstering the universal standard.

Through research and collaboration with scientists and technologists, we will propose an alternative standard of measurement that will give form to personal, intuitive, asynchronous time. Characterized by its flexibility and functional basis in shared sentience, our framework will facilitate desynchronization from prescribed chronological standards, such as Greenwich Mean Time, as well as geopolitical standards.

However, desynchronization does not necessarily mean isolation. Rather, we are also interested in investigating how time is communally negotiated, and how to give this communion form.

By intervening in the dynamics between universal, personal, and collective temporalities, we are reconsidering what constitutes “the present.&lrquo; In changing how we formalize time, one could stretch the present or – perhaps unfathomably – compress it. “Now,” then, becomes a malleable space in which one can reorient the relationship between memory, action, and possible futures. By reconfiguring the relation between time and space, your presence can take form elsewhere, or elsewhen, through another sense of time.