Time took on an elastic and sinuous quality during the Covid-19 lockdowns, if it retained any coherence at all. Days bled into each other, as did walks and Zoom catchups and Sopranos episodes. Feeling a sense of “temporal weirdness”, California artist and writer Jenny Odell set up a camera on a tripod facing her window. “Time felt the same in my room, but in the photos, it rained, it stormed, and the fog rolled in from San Francisco,” she recalls. Flicking through the photos, Odell encountered a mysterious emotion that she calls “it”: an experience of being taken out of the present moment, with all that was familiar rendered strange and changeable, and wide vistas of possibility opened up.
This feeling of “it” – the sense that everything and everyone could at any moment be made anew – runs through her cultural and political meditation, Saving Time. Odell, who previously critiqued the attention economy in How to Do Nothing, sets the stakes high for her new investigation. Observing that popular attitudes to time – as, say, an unrelenting march towards inevitable climate apocalypse – encourage a self-fulfilling nihilism, she proposes a different model, more attuned to the natural world.
