Choose Your Filter!: Fragmented Time
Visiting ZKM’s Choose Your Filter! highlighted how digital media fragments our sense of time and focus. The curated browsers and installations revealed each interface as a “raft of conceptual filters” shaping what we see and ignore.
Moving through thirty years of net art – from Jeffrey Shaw’s interactive timeline to JODI’s glitchy screens – I felt attention sliced into micro-moments by design. It was both inspiring and unsettling to see this history reframed through art, underscoring that browsing is choreographed by design choices, not the neutral, endless flow we often assume.
Jeffrey Shaw, Net.Art Browser, 1999/2025
The exhibition left me pondering our frazzled attention. In a digital world awash with stimuli, the “constant fragmentation of our time and concentration” has become the new normal. Each interactive artwork reminded me how easily we flit from screen to screen, every ping vying for a sliver of focus. Deep engagement feels rare when we are conditioned to skip, click, and scroll.
JODI, Wrong Browser .DE, 2012 / © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo: Felix Grünschloß
Inspired by these reflections, my project Invisible Hours will reveal the hidden fragments of women’s daily lives. Time poverty – having more tasks than available time – disproportionately burdens women juggling work, care, and community roles. I envision overlapping timelines and ambient narratives, each “filter” revealing hidden hours of unpaid labour. Borrowing the exhibition’s interactive approach, each installation will invite visitors to actively reshape the narrative, making visible the hidden hours in everyday life. For the audience, this means choosing how to filter their own experience of the exhibition, and, by extension, questioning how society filters the value of time.
Resource：
Choose Your Filter!：https://zkm.de/en/2025/02/choose-your-filter
JODI, Wrong Browser .DE, 2012 / © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo: Felix Grünschloß
Jeffrey Shaw, Net.Art Browser, 1999/2025 / © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo: Felix Grünschloß
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