THESIS: 90 Minutes with the Machine

An excerpt from Victoria Ngai’s recently defended M.Arch thesis entitled “90 Minutes with the Machine.”

Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

— Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time

When I spotted it, I knew that the clock in the lecture hall was waiting for me to pluck it from the wall. Lucky me: there was no class going on, so it was easy. It was an archetypal clock, as unornamented as you could possibly imagine. Plain face, plain frame, plain numbers, plain hands. It wasn’t a clock you hung to make a statement, unless the statement was merely the hour and the minute.

I would be photographing the clock for ninety minutes, taking one photo every minute. I laid the clock at one end of the table, setting my tripod above it and my laptop adjacent to it. I needed to write a 200-word statement, and an hour and a half was enough time to crank it out in the meanwhile.

^{90 minutes of the lecture hall clock running}

I let the camera timer go and turned to my laptop. It took a few minutes of conscious effort to close the usual distracting tabs and open Word. Before long, I was immersed in figuring out the perfect combinations of words; I was writing about my thesis, about photography and time. The coffee I had earlier and the tall backless stool kept me wired.

^{90 minutes of nine Marlboro Gold cigarettes}

^{90 minutes of me fidgeting}

I was cognizant of the fact that the alternative to looking at my laptop screen was looking at the clock. Well, that was stupid – why was looking at the clock even an alternative? There was literally no point. Killing time by watching it tick away was the epitome of an oxymoron. I came to forget about the clock anyway – the light cast a glare on the face so I couldn’t look at it even if I wanted to.

The ninety minutes passed by, but I still needed to work with the statement a little and I had booked the studio for two hours, and what was the harm in taking a couple more photos. It took another 14 minutes to get my writing to a good point, so I saved my statement, packed up, and put the clock back on the wall where it would continue telling the time.