There’s a time that doesn’t tick, a temporal dimension more granular than the clock and yet less rigid. The traditional Japanese calendar, which first divides the year into 24 major segments called sekki, and then further into 72 periods known as kō, offers an example: each “microseason”, lasting around five days, is defined not by the uniform sweep of the calendar, but by fleeting, embodied phenomena. Between 14 and 18 of February “fish emerge from the ice”, while from June 11 “rotten grass becomes fireflies”, and then, around November 22, “rainbows hide”. These signals of change feel minute, local, almost private. And yet, collectively, they shape a world in which time is not a container to be filled, but a texture to be felt.

This expression of granular time reminds me of another type of temporal granularity – one that belongs not to farmers and poets, but to computer workers. In my A CV of Microwork, a piece commissioned by Art Goss, I took a schedule like that of Google Calendar and filled it with all the invisible and seemingly unproductive microtasks one performs throughout the day, for example: “Teams-Bulding: Install Microsoft Teams 1.5 00.8070”, “Waiting for Godot (Zoom Call Person not Showing Up)”, “Mentally Typing Email”. The last one takes place between 19:30 and 19:39, while there are even shorter ones, lasting one or two minutes. This CV is absurd, but also honest. It documents a form of labor that is fragmented, hidden, and hyper-quantified – time shattered into commercial microseconds. Here’s what I wrote to introduce the piece: “The paperwork explosion of the ’60s, which computers were supposed to end, has become a collision of digital microinteractions – a microwork explosion. In this CV of microwork, the life experience of the traditional résumé coincides with user experience.”

But shrinking time is not only a matter of scale. As I argued in A School Knows No Stopwatch, beyond a certain threshold, reducing the quantity of time begins to affect its very quality. In the text I was referring to tutorials with students, those one on one meetings in which a project is discussed. These moments are crucial in art and design education, yet they tend to become shorter and shorter due to the growing number of students or the reduction of staff – which, in effect, amounts to the same thing. When a tutorial becomes too short, the clock becomes the stopwatch; and the stopwatch doesn’t just measure – it controls. It changes how we relate to ourselves and to others. When time is compressed into units of efficiency, we stop noticing the subtle transitions. The thresholds, the mood swings, the slow dawning of understanding… all become a disturbance in a system that values speed over presence.

And yet, the microworker’s fragmented schedule isn’t just imposed externally; it becomes part of their perception of reality, turning activities into slots, that is, discrete, interchangeable bits. Attention itself becomes modular, dividable: a Taylorism of the mind. It’s what Hito Steyerl called junktime: time without quality. Over time, this process erodes our ability to dwell within experiences fully, continuously pulling us away from the gradual unfoldings that give meaning to life’s transitions.

On the one hand, we have the granularity of the season, which urges us to inhabit time by exercising attention, like we do when we notice the rapid, sudden shifts in the colors of a sunset. On the other hand, we have the granularity of the stopwatch, which compels us to see time as an external authority that manages and controls us. As much as we might wish to, we can’t escape either the clock or the stopwatch (After all, trains are supposed to leave at an appointed hour, and we don’t want them to be late) – so let’s make sure not to bring clock or stopwatch in when they’re not needed.