Time Machine //
Existential Life
Calculator _
Machines for Absurd Living / 2016
The Absurdist at STOREFRONTLAB, San Francisco
MACHINE #1 addresses one of the most relentless of human struggles: our temporality in the physical world. Using statistical calculations, the ma- chine determines how many hours one has left to live. Printing this conclusion on a receipt for the beholder, the machine prompts us to consider time as a currency to be well spent.
"My field", says Goethe, "is time". That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact is the absurd man ? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to leave without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgement but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life. That would be unfair. I am not even speaking here of that paltry eternity that is called posterity (...) There can be no question on holding forth on ethics."
Camus -
The Myth of Sisyphus.