pierandrei’s thinkfluid

If once luxury was synonymous of precious materials and rare manufacturing now is getting its way on time issue. Time is money so what is more voluptuous than taking time to do your own things? Time for yourself: self-care, self-cultural growth, self-consciousness to counteract the fast side of life. A praise of “slowness” on which many cultural associations are based (ex. Slowfood in Italy). Design too is working on this topics giving substance to products and services in which time perception is basic.
An example of this approach is given by the RealSnailMail project presented last October in London by Boredomresearch and actually under further development. It’s a project which plays on many fields, from joke to provocation, from technology to research. The installation suggested an alternative webmail service “…where an individual can visit the ‘Real Snail Mail’ website and email a message which travels at the speed of light to our server where it is entered into a queue. Here it waits until a snail wonders in range of a hot spot. The hot spot is our dispatch centre in the form of a RFID reader. This reader identifies the snail from the RFID chip attached to its shell and checks to see it has not already been assigned a message to carry. If the snail is available it is assigned the message at the top of the list. It then slips away into the technological wasteland. Located at the other end of the pond (in the case of aquatic snails) is the drop off point. When, or if, the snail ever makes it here, it is identified by another reader, which then forwards the relevant message to the recipients email address; once again travelling at the speed of light”. The website would communicate the service, encouraging users to consider the effort involved in lugging their message across the bottom of a pond by a diminutive mollusc and for this reason urging them to send a message of value. At the same time it would warn them that their message would suffer the perils of predation or interception on route”.In the words of one the authors – Armin Medosch: “One thing technology promises is speed, acceleration, more of everything in less time. Culturally we seem obsessed with immediacy. Time is not to be taken but crammed to bursting point. Most corporations use RFID for this reason. As artists we are more interested in time. We make things that occupy time, that compute in time, that change over time. To experience these things you have to sacrifice time. Time that could have been spent achieving, pursuing or succeeding in some other preoccupation”.
This post was submitted to celebrate the first national day of Slowness in Italy (February 19).