Time Killer
Chiini Lin, Yunjie Smeets, and Xiaotian Ma collaborated on this work.
It's Friday night at 23:00, everyone is enjoying the start of the weekend, however, you are working on your essay due at midnight. Although you had months to work on it, you decided to do it last minute. Now you regret your decisions and wonder why you did not just start sooner. Still, even with the immediate anxiety and pressure of the pending deadline, you cannot help but think to yourself: “I can start this in a minute..”
It is almost a universal and human experience to unnecessarily delay or postpone a task. Although we know that procrastination is a harmful tendency, we keep on doing it. Our drive to delay is stronger than our drive to act. It is said our lack of action comes due to fear, insecurities, boredom, anxiety, frustration, resentment, and self-doubt. Procrastination in essence is to avoid negative emotions and the desire to feel better in the short term.
Jeans
We created Jeans, an artificial creature, that embodies this human characteristic. Jeans is made of clay and holds an hourglass. Jeans promises the audience that he will start doing his task once the minute is up, symbolized by the hourglass. But due to his nature, he will reset the hourglass, right before the time is up. Thus, giving in to his urge to procrastinate.
The audience had an overall positive reaction to our creature and showed a lot of empathy towards Jeans’ procrastination behavior, finding it relatable. Others were confused and disappointed that Jeans’ actions were so simple and straightforward, expecting more but not getting anything after waiting for the time to run out. That is exactly what we wanted to trigger in the audience. The disappointing and frustrating feeling that comes up when we procrastinate. Jeans confronts the audience with their own tendency to procrastinate.
The ongoing loop of Jeans turning the hourglass triggers the dread of lack of productivity to the onlookers. On top of that, it invites the viewer to see procrastination from a different point of view while posing the question when does it stop?
While Jeans as an artificial creature is unable to escape procrastination, this project wants to showcase the human spiral of procrastination and how without any proactive action, it is (nearly) impossible to break out of this loop.
Links for Artificial Creatures
Welcome to my Artificial Creature portfolio.