Gotta Make Time (GMT), 2025 Durational livestream, 264 hours
Developed remotely by artist TJ Shin with London-based facilitator Final Hot Desert, Gotta Make Time (GMT) is a durational livestream exploring what it means to be in sync, or fall out of sync, within global systems of time. From July 25 00:00 UTC to August 5 00:00 UTC, an 11-day livestream will transmit a distant view of the Royal Greenwich Observatory from a Travelodge hotel room that overlooks the Prime Meridian, with Final Hot Desert acting as Shin’s on-site proxy. The livestream will be viewable on the project website and will debut concurrently at Benny’s Video in New York.
The Royal Greenwich Observatory, as the established location of the Prime Meridian, became the global reference point for 0° longitude through its role in supporting Britain’s imperial trade and navigation. This laid the foundation for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), later succeeded by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the current international civil standard to which all global time zones are calibrated.
Despite this standardization, many non-Western lunisolar calendars follow the lunar cycle, measuring a year roughly 11 days shorter than the solar year. These temporal gaps are periodically corrected by the addition of a leap month, occurring this year on July 25, underscoring the slipperiness of time across various cultural and calendric systems. Here, the 11 days become a poetic ambiguity: they may represent a drift from universal time, a return to it, or mark time that does not exist within its frame.
Staged through multiple layers of absence and distance, GMT reflects the various contradictions between presence and precision, timelessness and timeliness, within global systems of coordination and technological mediation. It invites reflection on how so-called universal systems are constructed and maintained, and where moments of rupture or disappearance might occur.
Livestream from July 25 00:00:00 UTC to 11:47:18 UTC
Photo by Craig Jun Li