Every Second of Downtime

In the organizer's words:

By Ant Hampton / Time Based Editions
SPECIAL PROGRAMME: HOW THINGS TRAVEL

Light is no longer required for producing images such as this. Instead, you need statistical and thermodynamic power on a vast scale.

“100% lights out” is the term used for facilities like warehouses that are fully automated.

To “sunset” something, in tech jargon, is to discontinue, to phase out. Today, humans are being sunsetted, in many fields.

A young female voice asks us to create in our minds the image of "an audience”, sitting on chairs in a field at sunset, looking over at a huge warehouse surrounded by fences and cameras. This voice then guides us through a book that we each hold. The pages contain what seem to be photographs from January 2026 showing this same audience being guided, by a young female worker who approaches them in the field, into and through the high-tech fulfillment centre where she works. In this oppressive and automated space of predictive, machine vision, an outage occurs. Systems go down; cheers go up; hallucinations unfurl in a last-gasp of imagination and sabotage.

The events in the book will be a mix of documentary and dream, deliberately confusing / connecting / conflating different uses of the warehouse building to disect contemporary manifestations of the ‘accumulation’ (for profit) pathology, be that via knowledge/data, material goods, or detained people.

The imagery, created in collaboration with artist Emanuele Dainoti, has the style of printed photographs taken with a point-and-shoot camera, with a date stamp of January 20 2026. On the one hand an acknowledgement that any work confronting these subjects will be quickly ‘out of date’, this also roots us in a moment compounding several tipping-points, for example:

• at the World Economic Forum in Davos the international rules-based order is declared dead,
• a week earlier, AI crosses the threshold from screens into the physical world, incorporated en-masse into robotics,
• ICE starts to plan a huge expansion of its’ mass detention facilities, explicitly based on the Amazon model of logistics.

The production can also be booked as part of the 5-showpackage.

A commission by Fidena, supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, in collaboration with Noorderzon Festival of Performing Arts & Society.

The performance as part of the Fidena Festival is supported by the City of Bochum, the City of Herne, the Zollverein Foundation, the Kemmnader Kreis and the Alfred and Cläre Pott Foundation.