A Story of Speed

In 1964, a key year in Japan’s contemporary history, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out that “just as work began with the division of labour, duration began with the division of time”. And for this purpose, the clock is the machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes and hours on an assembly line. When treated in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human e xperience, and the clock contributes to the creation of a numerically quantifiable and mechanically controlled universe. Not without reason, during the Paris Commune of 1871, insurgent Parisians, including some artists, fired their guns at the clocks in the city’s towers. But more than a century later, we are even more aware that the rhythm of the capitalist machine is the cause of a progressive deterioration of cultural identities towards a homogeneous global culture, as well as the cause of a myriad of chronopathologies and the general degenerative deteri oration of the body, systematically exploited by the cadences of work, often leading to depression and suicide. Disorders that are now very widespread, caused by the normalised stress from which capitalism itself knows how to extract profits through the pharmaceutical, wellnessand entertainment industries. The artworks in this exhibition point to these phenomena and to the possibility of decelerating and recovering one’s own rhythm.