As part of ALLGOLD’s commencement celebration on Sunday, September 20th, 2015, Avant.org presented Taeyoon Choi and E Roon Kang’s In Search of Personalized Time at the MoMA PS1 Print Shop, coinciding with the close of Printed Matter’s 10th annual New York Art Book Fair.

Choi & Kang’s multimodal project theorizes and documents the concept of subjective time, placing it in contrast with modern deference to human synchronization. Realized most recently as a participatory performance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), their project works to emphasize our perpetual displacement from Newtonian convention, so-called absolute time. In the artist’s words, the project is “an attempt to live unreal time in a real-time world.”

For this event, selected volunteers were asked to document their day using “personal timekeeper” devices engineered by Choi and Kang, the results of which will be incorporated into a forthcoming book via Avant.org. After syncing the devices to their personal clocks, the volunteers were asked to spend the afternoon on a “scavenger hunt for time,” taking the Art Book Fair as an opportunity to begin new conversations about their sense of lived time and the significance of publication as an act of preserving a particular moment. Volunteers were then asked to return to the Print Shop at a scheduled point, but referring to their personally calibrated clock, returned at staggered, incongruent intervals. Upon returning, the “time travelers” joined an ongoing, asynchronous discussion of their experiences, documentation of which will be included in the forthcoming book.

Setting the tone for Choi & Kang’s architected moment of personal time, Avant.org editor Sam Silver also performed an hour-long improvisational sound collage, broadcast live on ALLGOLD radio. Silver’s mix considers related themes: elongated moments, repetitive figures, drones, melodic patterns,(non)-quantized rhythm, and now acts as a kind of sonic record of the days events, available to stream in full below: