If, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, time and life are inseparable in late capital, how might one reclaim time as one’s own? Time’s establishment as locally-determined is closely tied to commerce and market logistics—to the point that breaking this tie may perhaps lead to such a reclamation. But how does one’s perception of time affect one’s ability (or willingness) to enact a protest against it? As an artist and active participant in the contemporary precarious labor market, I recently found myself engaged in the construction of an object envisioned for such a protest. Even after a number of iterations, however, there seems to be little hope for my symbolic actions on a grander scale; much like any capitalist apparatus, time is an ever-present force whose hegemony is broken only through a near-simultaneous, wide-spread shift in cultural practice.

The Digital Sundial uses your current location to calculate the “real solar time”—that is, the time a sundial would read at your longitude. It raises questions of global capital’s reliance on precarious labor and time as a product, sold alongside the websites, articles, poems, and other output created by the freelance class.