Notes for a Time/Bank articulates a series of reflections about the political, historical and anthropological necessities for the existence of alternative economies and initiatives, such as time banking. Divided in ten chapters, the film combines researches on historical attempts to implement alternative economies with various commentaries on the nature and value of money.

Utopias seem like locomotives to me,
pulling mankind’s trains through history.
Yet, they can never arrive since the trains’ timetables
are newly written by every new generation.

—Horst Krüger in conversation with Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, May 6, 1964

Matteo Pasquinelli: e-flux’s Time/Bank is inspired by similar historical projects developed in times of economic crisis or for different social reasons in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries—let's say during industrialism and Fordism. From your perspective, what happened to “time”—to the notion of time itself in the last fifty years?—I'm curious to know how art, in your view, has perceived the shift in the “substance” of time today compared to, for instance, the years of Duchamp, who used to say: “Time is money, but my capital is not money, it is time.”

Julieta Aranda: On the one hand, Time/Bank was inspired both by Paul Glover's Ithaca hours (a time bank organized in Ithaca, NY in the early ’90s), and by the utopian propositions of Robert Owen and Josiah Warren: The Cincinnati Time Store, and the short-lived utopian community New Harmony. On the other hand—and this only becomes clear when looking back at this project after a few years—I think that Time/Bank was not only a response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, but also a way to examine the recent processes of decoupling of time and value. Since purposefully wasting time is very much a part of artistic processes, we wanted to tinker with the value of time that was not applied to production... but then things worked out differently than expected, somehow.

Anton Vidokle: When we decided to organize a time bank, in 2008, we came to it via the internet, but at a time when a lot of people already declared the death of the internet as an emancipatory medium. So in a sense we started the time bank post-internet.

Today I learned that Alexander Kojeve speaks of substantive change that occurs between pre and post eras. In this sense things cease being the same—their substance changes pre-war and post-war or pre-revolution and post-revolution, for example.

This means that even without going so far back as Duchamp, there has been a substantive change just in the past two decades. But how does one know that substance has changed? If time was a toaster oven, I suppose you would detect this change when you put in a pop tart, but then what pops out is a plant. On a certain level this is what I have observed with our Time/Bank: despite our intentions, it produces something other than a time-based economy. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure what it produces exactly. But we sure have put a lot of time into it. This is fine with me, insofar as this is an art project, but it is also a device and I don't know what this device really makes.

MP: My second question is about the contemporary temporal background—about how the background changed during the last two decades of wild financialization, de-materialization of labor, and cybernetic abstraction. What is the time of a Time Bank in the age of High Frequency Trading on stock markets and global digital networks? What is the relationship between Time/Bank and this high level of abstraction of time?

JA: A friend (Anthony Marcellini) was saying recently that every technological breakthrough seems to bring about the possibility of leasing things that we were previously able to own, and the possibility of working for free doing something that previously we would have been paid to do. Apparently the Labor Theory of Value isn't really holding up, and man/hours are not the relevant units of measure anymore. In essence, if time can no longer be converted into capital straight up, then it is not possible to produce a time-based economy. And then it is also not possible to know in tangible form what the holdings of Time/Bank may be—imaginary vaults filled to the brim with potential that has been stripped of value? A perfect, post-planetary capital—in planet.

AV: Maybe time is dead. Killed by financial abstraction. Or maybe it was killed by an abstract painting. If there was a painting that could kill time it would probably be something by Malevich, like his white on white suprematist composition: there is no more difference and therefore no more time, as far as the eye can see.

MP: How abstract did the project become by itself, growing autonomously? How much did it develop out of control? Or was it absorbed and parasited by people, forces, and alien algorithms that you did not expect or plan in advance? Considering Time/Bank as a sort of fuzzy anthropological research, what did you find in the database of Time/Bank the day you went back to check? Can you mention some examples of the usage of the database or exchanges of time that opened up unpredicted directions?

AV: Time/Bank is continually spammed by alien robots. Periodically I look and see posts about semi-authentic Rolex watches for sale at low, low prices, Viagra pills, or various promotional materials. We have not been able to find or write an algorithm that would protect Time/Bank from this. When I looked into the database some months after we launched, I saw that there are hundreds or maybe by now thousands of ghosts in the database: fake ID profiles created by automated bots designed to penetrate forums and post promotions. We delete them, but they repopulate extremely quickly. This is completely annoying and really interesting, because this is very much a part of the substance of the internet that does not allow it to completely become the efficient machine it was designed to be. It slows things down, creates confusion, drains energy. It is a very weird sort of life form, similar to parasitic weeds. Maybe it will save us from high frequency trading...

JA: Last year, a web security firm conducted a study that found out that the internet isn't human anymore. Over 60 percent of all internet traffic is conducted by bots, constantly trying to sell each other life insurance and weird old secrets to lose belly fat. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that in between trying to count how many triangles are there, bots are enthusiastic time/bankers. But I also think that there are other potential users—a ghost network that is not made only out of bots, but also out of trace-economies that can actually maintain exchange values with our own currencies, if we open them up a little. For example, deep in China's spirit world, there is an inflation crisis brewing that would give central bankers chills. Inflation is everywhere, so of course it happens in the underworld too. Traditionally, paper money burned in China came in small denominations of fives or tens. But more recent generations of money printers have grown less restrained. The value of the biggest bills has risen in the past few decades to the millions and, more recently—like in Zimbabwe—to the billions and trillions. The reason: even Hong Kong's dead try to keep up with the Joneses, and their living relatives believe that they need more and more fake bucks to pay for high-cost indulgences like condos and iPads.

Economists say the problem is that the underworld has no control over how much currency enters its economy. The more “ghost money” burned, the more inflation continues to zoom upward. It's the money supply that's causing it. So, one wonders if, like Zimbabwe, the underworld should dollarize its economy and begin accepting mainly U.S. currency. Few people would burn real dollars, reducing the amount of cash flowing into the spirit world. This wouldn’t solve the problem of scarcity in the underworld (who, for example, is providing paper iPads for the Hong-Kong Neanderthals, whose blood lines have disappeared?) But, if we get all of the Chinese ghosts into time/banking, we may not only be able to provide iPads for the Neanderthals, but we may also get to a very interesting place.

Credits

With images, ideas, sounds, texts and help from:

Julieta Aranda, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Hans-Ola Ericsson, Federico Fellini, Bill Ferrari, Marysia Frycz, Elena Gilbert, Paul Glover, David Graeber, Throbbing Gristle, Felix Guattari, Kubatana, Fritz Lang, Györgi Ligeti, Andrea Newmann, Ania Niedziółko, Luigi Nono, Santiago Punte, Raqs Media Collective, Hartmut Rosa, Mariana Silva, Stella Art Foundation, Morton Subotnick, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Connie Weinzapfel, H.G. Wells, and the Working Men’s Institute in New Harmony.