Ecology of time

Ecology of time, 2023, single-channel video, 9 min 42 (sound by Eunice Kim)

In my project I would like to explore how cultural differences affect an individual’s way of living in terms of time management. What I’ve learned from interviews and researches, I came to realise that the dating system (and the way of counting daily hours even) are different according to culture, and it influences the way in which people schedule their time for daily living. As is well known, it is a solar dating system according to the Gregorian calendar that are used by most of the world. But there are other cultures which use the globally standardized calendar and their own endemic calendar together. My project deals with three cultures among them such as Islam, Hebrew, and Korean. In those cultures, the standard solar dating system has been used since Western modernization but at the same time their traditional dating system has strongly operated up until now, which still affects people’s way of living in terms of time. With having two time systems in parallel, those of such cultures have more complex ways of managing their time schedule. My project aims to visualize the ways in which people belonging to such three cultures adapt to the social code of time-scheduling in their individual arrangement of time. In that way, my project could also reveal the certain gap or conflict between the internationally standard dating system and the endemic one of each culture's time system. Eventually, it is to show how an individual's management of time schedule depends on one’s own cultural way of dating and time-counting.