We now understand that the passage of time varies under different conditions: at the beginning of the universe, it flowed much more slowly than it does today; it also slows near a black hole, eventually halting entirely at its event horizon. On a cognitive level, our relationship to time is equally complex. With age, the passage of time often feels accelerated. Psychologists observe a connection between this sensation and the number of cycles we have experienced – such as annual, monthly, and other recurring patterns. Each successive cycle seems to pass increasingly unnoticed. In a sense, we automate our perception of time, leading to its subjective compression.
In the modern era, time became a class-related concept. In economies reliant on systems of slave labour – primarily in the colonies, but also in serfdom-dependent societies such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – time existed in multiple dimensions. As late as 1807, Hubert Vautrin observed of the Polish lands that ” the slave toils for the master from dawn till dusk.” Nightfall did not necessarily signal rest or sleep; often, peasant families took to the fields during these hours to secure their survival through the harsh winter months. For the peasant class, time practically did not exist as a structured notion; days blurred into a continuous mass, with the passage of years marked solely by the rhythms of the changing seasons.
Meanwhile, the Polish and European aristocracy lived in excessive leisure, suffused with perpetual boredom. With little to meaningfully occupy their time, nobles often indulged in hosting extravagant parties or organising hunts. At times, a nobleman would commit acts of cruelty or self-righteous violence against peasants, finding in the accompanying surge of adrenaline a fleeting escape from the stifling monotony of palace and court life. This interplay of boredom and the nobility’s unchecked arbitrariness not only highlighted class divisions but also reinforced the mechanisms of power and control.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, noblewomen, increasingly eager for education and professional opportunities, sought to overcome the stifling boredom of their lives. However, unlike Jewish women who were beginning to enter universities during this period, most Catholic and Protestant aristocratic women could aspire only to graduating from teachers’ colleges. However, even these modest ambitions were quickly curtailed by their families. Women were drawn back to palaces or manor houses, where they resumed cultivating boredom while awaiting marriage.
The emergence of the labour movement marked a revolutionary shift in the organisation of time. While the economically privileged retained the freedom to manage their time as they pleased, workers’ demands, manifestos, and strikes gradually wrested away the tools that allowed the elite to arbitrarily control the schedules of the so-called lower classes. Over time, labour movements in some parts of the world managed to achieve the division of the day into periods of work and rest. However, rather than eliminating time as a marker of class divisions, this transformation merely rendered it another standardised system of measurement. In economically developed nations, this system remains firmly under the control of market forces and state regulations.
The 3s/8h theme juxtaposes two distinct units of time. The 8-hour period represents the portion of the day that, as advocated by the labour movement, is dedicated to rest and self-organisation. In contrast, 3 seconds signifies the minimum span applied to measure an audience’s engagement on social media. Today, the perception of time’s passage – and with it, the ability to manage it – has become increasingly elusive and relative. We live in an era when most citizens in Western societies have a lot of time free from professional and reproductive labour, yet experience it as perpetually scarce and insufficient.
Nowadays, time is no longer just a materially measurable and finite resource. Attention has become the fundamental unit of time measurement, serving as both a contemporary currency and a personal, neurological challenge. Following eras defined by serfdom, factory labour, and other forms of employment that tied specific tasks to the time spent on them, we now see a relationship between time and work dictated by efficiency and task completion. Simultaneously, we are immersed in an attention economy whose principles go against the everyday time-work economy.
The irregular working hours and flexible forms of employment characteristic of late capitalism foster a state of perpetual readiness and fragmented presence. The boundaries between working time and leisure time have become increasingly blurred, with both immersed in the timelessness of capitalist production. As a result, time has transformed into a personal currency – a tool for self-exploitation and a source of stress.
Historically, the concept of free time has been tied to mechanisms of community building, the preservation of traditions, and the fight for civil rights. Today, however, most citizens in Western societies have more so-called free time than ever before. Yet, this time has been redefined as a lucrative market rather than a social, political, or personal resource. As a result, it has given rise to a form of phantom time – a seemingly autonomous space that, under the guise of freedom of choice and self-determination, dissipates into distracted absorption. For instance, Netflix reports that its users spend an average of around 2 hours daily watching content, while an estimated 2-3 hours are spent on social media. Since the average engagement with social media content is often measured in seconds rather than minutes or hours, messages consumed in such fleeting moments often bypass verbalisation or even conscious awareness.
The proliferation of the Internet and social networks has drastically shortened the time needed to assimilate a single piece, while the sheer volume of recordings and albums available on streaming services now exceeds human cognitive capacity. At the same time, the mass popularity and decreasing costs of recording and archiving devices increasingly contribute to replacing listening and observation processes with machine learning, effectively ceding the field to AI. However, this rather bleak scenario is being reimagined through contemporary approaches to sound art, which emphasise the communal nature of the experience and the importance of spaces dedicated to fostering the sonic imagination.
Overstimulation has become a daily reality for most people in the modern world. Its first consequences – neurological, psychological, and social – are already well-documented, prompting the need to reconsider how genuinely free time can be understood and used. The privatisation of stress and the tendency to alleviate it through market-driven modes of relaxation often lead to a search for enduring structures that can imbue value to moments outside the logic of production. Perhaps the conservative turn, with its emphasis on nurturing established systems and relationships, is a response to the sensation of time slipping away and spilling beyond its own framework.
The theme of 3s/8h addresses, among other topics, the concept of free time and serves as a springboard for an artistic dialogue exploring issues such as people’s history, the emancipation of labour movements, the social impacts of economic transformations, and the influence of technology in shaping communities.
