Photo: Courtesy Gallery MODERNISM, San Francisco, with special thanks to Martin Müller.


A conceptual American artist, Jonathon Keats, has just opened his own ‘Bureau of Standards’. He offers every person a personalized ‘conversion table’ that each individual can use to calculate the equivalence between his time and terrestrial time. Rather than basing it on an objective, impersonal and common time, which is the same for all of the planet’s inhabitants (the second today being officially defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between 2 hyperfine levels of the fundamental state of the Cesium 133 atom), he proposes that each person can calculate ‘his’ own second, and therefore his own time, based on his pulse, with one pulse beat equalling one second.
In the example of Jonathon Keats, a ‘Keats second’ is equal to 0.909 of a terrestrial second, and therefore one terrestrial second measures 1.100 ‘Keats seconds’. From this calculation, one ‘Keats day’ is equivalent to 21.816 terrestrial hours, with one terrestrial day equalling 26.400 ‘Keats hours’. Therefore, one ‘Keats year’ is 332.012 terrestrial days, and one terrestrial year equals 401.775 ‘Keats days’.
Jonathon Keats does not stop there. He goes further and suggests ways to individually measure distance, volume, mass, energy and force. So, is his idea as preposterous as it seems? After all, a summer afternoon for a ten-year old child seems to offer an eternity ahead, while a stressed-out businessman will feel ‘throttled’ by the lack of time. A kilo does not have the same weight for an old woman as for a body builder. Walking a kilometre for an overweight person is not the same as for a marathon runner. “In this day and age, everyone has an iPod, and most people have TiVo,” Mr. Keats says. “Mass-customization is the cutting edge of democracy. By taking a personal approach to measurements, we can each become completely autonomous.”
Jonathon Keats is a provocateur whose talent is to ask questions that seem at first totally absurd, but that also point out certain uncomfortable symptoms of the malaise in our so-called ‘advanced’ society. What is the relationship between democracy and the measure of time? Historically, time measurement has always been the privilege of power. Whoever can dictate the time is the one who reigns: the Church, with its bells that regulate life, then the King, and finally the State. The progress of synchronizing the time (the ‘same time’ for all) has thus accompanied the gradual rise of democracy, the most ‘advanced’ and ‘synchronized’ form of social organization. It is obvious then that, when the measure of time returns to a very personal and individual affair, the entire social organization will quickly plunge into chaos.
How do we ‘synchronize’ my 0.900 of a second with your 1.008 seconds? In initiating this debate, which is not as trivial as it seems at first glance, Jonathon Keats can be credited with pointing a finger at the exacerbated individualistic deviation that has occurred today, as well as with underscoring the dissolution of the common ‘values’ within the gulf that is constantly growing larger between the ‘masters of time’ and the others, or in other words, the disappearance of the ‘community’ that is ‘unified’ by one and the same time.
“My time is not the same as your time,” he seems to be saying. Is this a prophecy? Are the conflicts that tear apart our planet today, at a unique time incarnated by the Internet, not simply the conflicts between two radically different perceptions of time and history? My time against yours.

Source: Europa Star April-May 2006 Magazine Issue