Daylight saving time was devised to ensure agricultural labourers worked appropriate number of hours in the day and a peculiar quirk in the winter months, in various countries throughout the world clocks are brought back 1hr. Meaning effectively 1hr of our year *gets lost* and unaccounted for, it disappears.
At a time when people’s habits, urban change, or state surveillance dramatically redraw familiar territories, The Lost Hour is a golden ticket to a new otherwise invisible world.
Here’s the challenge: while time stops for everyone else – the world is frozen – you have one hour to explore a secret zone, a negative space, that is a common space that citizens pass every day, but never see.
A dive into the past, a jump into the future. It could be a secret place that only you and those you allow, would recognize. Only that this place is very close, as it always was. If you could climb the layers of infrastructure that make your place work, or dig deeper into them, where would you go? If you knew the hour was going to be erased what you liberate?
This is how the challenge works:
- FIND the portal and enter that negative space. Occupy it, reimagine it, hack it, exploit it, make something funny or ridiculous in it. Get there, do whatever you want (You’ll get away with it …as long as you make it back out of the portal before that time is up.)
- POST a 30 seconds video within 48 hours on your on line platform of choice (youtube, vimeo, instagram, tumblr, facebook, twitter). Tag it #thelosthour
- NOMINATE 3 more troublemakers to take up the challenge! Don’t forget: you’re not alone in this Challenge. You have been nominated by someone and you have the right to nominate others. Dozens of artists, explorers or just common people are sharing their secret zones. You are already part of this community, enjoy it and connect with others!
We’ll be keeping track of all #thelosthour secret zones around the world at http://losthourchallenge.tumblr.com/
On November 27th John Law and Julia Solis will show the people your challenges during The Influencers festival in Barcelona.
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
