What is a Clock? | Jenny Odell @longnow
What is a Clock? | Jenny Odell  @longnow
Uploaded June 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Artist and writer Jenny Odell reexamines what is a clock, and how clocks shape our relationships to the world, each other, and ourselves.

From the Long Now Seminar, “Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock” by Jenny Odell.
Watch the full talk here: youtu.be/9oarFok__1s

Artist and writer Jenny Odell brings her acutely insightful observations to the dominant framework of time, based on industrial and colonial worldviews, that is embedded within our societies. Addressing the inability to reconcile the artificially constructed time pressures of modern culture with planetary-scale crisis, she offers a series of histories, concepts, and places as "provocations that can defamiliarize an old language of time, while pointing in the direction of something else."

Odell's newest book is Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (March 02023) and her first book is the widely-read How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (02019). Her visual work is exhibited internationally, and she's been artist in residence at Recology SF (the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. Previously, Odell taught digital art at Stanford University.

"Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock" was given on March 07, 02023 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

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What is a Clock? | Jenny Odell

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