Is time the enemy, or is it the amount of time? And is softening elongating and slowing? Is it changing it up from a race, setting another pace? There's no music if there's no pause. There's no music without silence. Otherwise, you are just creating a kind of, constant noise. To make a more beautiful song of life, we need the pause and silence.

There's such status attached to being fast. That's the problem.

We live in a society where being busy is really highly valued.

You're a loser if you're slow.

Being too busy to do things is a marker of esteem and success.

Being in the fast lane is being successful, valued, having status.

A hustle-based environment, a high productivity environment. You're essentially being judged on how much you can squeeze into time.

This taken for granted notion, really, that progress is about speed.

That's going to make you feel time-pressured, it's going to make you feel like you've not got enough time.

That you can judge how advanced a society is by how fast it's moving.

What's this doing to our decision making processes? What's it doing to feelings of regret and morality?

I think so much about how politically useful it is that we are busy so much.

Who owns your time? What rights do you have to your time in life? Maybe what we need to do is to say, actually, having free time is a marker of success. That is something to aspire to.

My name is Judy Wiseman, and I'm an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, in sociology. If we think about modern work and previous regimes of work, we usually start with talking about pre-capitalist forms of work, whether it was agricultural work or cottage work, all kinds of work that really were organised not around the clock but around day and night, around the season, and around what E.P. Thompson talked about as kind of a task orientation, that one thought about jobs that needed doing. Cows needed milking, and ploughing needed doing. That we thought about things in terms of tasks, not in terms of time. A great break, really, with kind of capitalist working was people moving into workplaces and the introduction of clocks and timed labour rather than tasks. What you have is lots of people in offices, and in workplaces, in factories with labour contracts for the time rather than the task, and people being paid for the amount of time they spent as work rather than tasks.

The clock doesn't measure time, it produces it. The way we work has forged the way we think about time. Clock time as a concept developed alongside the workplace. But over the long span of human history, the clock is relatively new.

When I used to teach a course on time and capitalism, I would take the students to the British Museum. Downstairs, there's literally a horology department. And there was an old guy down there with a room full of clocks and watches like you wouldn't believe. Beautiful wooden cabinets with thousands of clocks and watches. And the guy would literally talk about how recent the pendulum had come in. He'd show them sundials, how people used to think about the day and the night and have just a completely different sense of the passing of time with seasons, and then how recent in history it is that there's a second hand. Before there was a second hand, there weren't seconds. We didn't measure seconds. Seconds didn't exist. So I just think it's always worth reflecting on that and what would it be to live outside of that again.

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I always say within my work that I'm sounding out possibilities for being right. I think the potential for art is the art can work as a rehearsal for life.

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Soft life is an opening on new ways of being. How can we imagine ways of being outside of the clock? Can we find pockets of soft time where time is unpinned from the hand of the clock? Can art open up a new relationship to time?

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My name is Shenece Oretha. I'm an artist mainly working in sound. Sound installations, sound sculptures, print, workshops, and text. I'm currently in residence at Somerset House Studios. Sound and time are so interrelated. Sound takes up time, and when I think about it, I think about how much I want to create space for people, and I want to think about what type of time I want people to spend, you know?

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I guess you can think about time in minutes and seconds, but you can also think about is it a relaxing time? Is it a time that is healing? Is it a time that is for grieving? Is it a time that produces any meaning?

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For example, at/Tribute, which is in tribute to NourbeSe Phillip, and there's some text Zong!

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The work seeks to create a space for grieving. I was like, "Wow, there's not really a space as a descendant of the slave trade." There's not a day for grieving so much, to think about the loss that was created there, and the hurt. And a text like Zong creates a ceremony on the page, and I wanted it to be enacted in space.

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I'm really interested in creating spaces which have a relationship outside of the production of monetary value, and that have uses, and value, and meaning that are for all the other aspects of life that are really important, I would say. I'm really trying to make another type of value.

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How we perceive time is really heavily dependent on our psychological state, particularly our emotions. The more connected we are with each other, the more we have these meaningful social interactions, the more in sync we are with each other, it would seem, the better we experience time. We can look back to the pandemic, and we can see that what that really told us about our experience of time is that when you lose your social interactions, when you lose the ability to see the people you want to see and talk to the people you want to talk to, time changes. It distorts and it passes much more slowly, and this is associated with poor wellbeing.

Dr. Ruth Ogden is a psychologist looking at how we perceive the passage of time.

When we are more engaged with each other, we experience time potentially similarly, we have a synchronicity, and this synchronicity, this feeling of belonging that comes from doing things with the same people that you love at the same time that they're doing them, that enhances our wellbeing.

Linear clock time isn't a universal understanding of time.

In the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in what we would consider to be the West, we have what we call a very monochronic perception on time. So time is linear, activities are performed on schedule, and this is inherently linked to this idea of productivity. I'll do this for this period of time to show that, and then I'll do this to show something else for a period of time. Now, if we look more perhaps to Latin American countries or some areas of the global south, we see a representation of time which is considered to be polychronic. The idea here is that rather than time being strict linear structure, time is considered to be much more cyclical. Events are able to occur simultaneously, and the past, the present, and the future are on a much more equal footing with one another. So we're not just driving forward linearly all the time, we are able to reflect backwards. One thing that we can do to try and counter this obsessive relationship between time use, time experience, and productivity is to look to a much more flexible representation of time in which we don't just value the linear progress of time moving forwards towards an individual goal, but we try and experience our pasts, presents, and futures on a much more equal footing. We allow time to unfold in a much more relaxed and natural manner.

There's a term that I deploy and I coined some time back called chronofeminism. Chronofeminism might be said to be a refusal to think of time as linear, as this imperial magisterial march from the past to the present to the future. It supposes or presupposes that time is embodied, and soft, and slushy, not even cyclical. It's not cyclical. It's not linear. It's slushy, and it has puddles.

How can we access different types of temporality, different timescales on a daily basis?

What does it mean to really hear somebody? To really listen to somebody, you have to spend time.

She held the palm of seeds, humming of home. She held the palm of seeds to her ear. Whispering. Listen. Whispering. Listen. Hear them. Seeds, seeds, seeds, seeds. Scatter. Seeds, seeds, seeds, seeds. Scatter.

The work Ah So It Go, Ah No So It Go, Go So! was a sound installation at Cubitt Gallery.

Full of futures. Full of history. A loss. Remembering. Ash, Ash, ash, ash. Remembering. A hold.

The work was really born out of a time of residence on the allotment in Layton, mainly to learn how to grow, especially how to grow here. I grew up here, but what does it mean to feel like I have no roots? So over a period of the year, I took to learning how to grow food. The allotment had a lot of Caribbean growers on it. They would direct me about how to grow by the moon, the wax and the wane of the moon, and how it affects the water levels within the soil, and which days would be the right day to plant a seed. Especially as someone working in sound, rhythms and changes of pace are so interesting. You have things like how long it takes for a seed to germinate. Several days, two weeks. How long before propagation time? How long until harvest? Most people that work full-time or work money jobs to be able to survive at the moment, I don't know how much time we get to really listen.

A hand. A palm. A touch. Remembering. Home. Home. Forgotten. Home. Remember. Here. Remember. Home. Forgetting. Home. Home. Remember. Home. Home. Home. Remember. Remember.

I think time is so fascinating, and disabled experiences of time really fascinate me. Living with chronic pain, in a flare-up, my sense of time gets kind of really expansive. Time, for me, in a flare up is a bit like a slinky. 23:19 PM in the midst of a pain flare. The pain feels so dense, like I could collapse into it like a black hole or a dying star. I might spend a few hours in this really expansive place and not realise, and then the slinky comes back together and suddenly I'm in a moment and time has sort of caught up. Expanding, and expanding, and expanding repeatedly feels like a kind of crypt time I have to turn towards. If I'm flaring and I'm in the world, the air around me feels slightly thicker so it feels like I'm moving through a slightly different fabric, and post flare up... 3:44 PM in the soft space of my bed where I spend a lot of time. ... I am utterly unhurried. The curtains are drawn so that the light is soft and opaque. And there's nothing that cannot be postponed. Letting time be loose and fluid. If life is a score, then in that moment I'm in counterpoint to lots of other things, and I'm providing a necessary stillness.

When my son, like this morning, he didn't want to get out of bed, and he had this big feeling. I'm just going to call it a big feeling. He could feel something that he could not articulate. Pain, or intense pleasure, or joy, I don't know what it was, but he couldn't move, and I had to stay in bed with him. To hell with productivity, we were in bed together for longer than usual. Maybe this is an invitation to recalibrate what it means to be productive. It is an invitation to recalibrate time itself. That time is slow, and time is embodied, and time is secreted in relation, not outside of relation.

One of the themes of the last two books was really to interrogate this notion that we're living in an acceleration society. That somehow we are living at a rate a speed that is faster than previous societies, and that the simple cause of this is technology. If we're just talking about the human experience of time, I think it is very differentiated. I think, A, it's different in different societies, I think it's different for different groups, and I think even in terms of individuals, we all experience parts of our lives of speeding up or slowing down, or faster or slower. I think there's just so many different dimensions to the human experience of temporality that I just think it's not useful to think about the whole society as kind of living in a period of acceleration.

In a world so heavily defined by the clock, how do we actually conceive of free time outside of productivity?

One of the things that we are looking at in our project exploring the influence of digital technology on time experience is what it means to have free time in a digital age and how people conceive of the idea of free time in a digital environment. People don't really talk about inactivity. So when we ask people about their lives, people talk about their things that they're doing, their markers of productivity, their markers of success, the devices they use. They don't talk about the time when they're not engaging in something that's measurable. Modern marketing has reconceptualized our understanding of free time to mean things that are not filled with work. And I think that this is something that is drawn out of this hustle culture, that we need to feel like we're doing something. We need to feel like we've filled life; otherwise, we've wasted life. So empty time is seen as dead time, filled time is seen as productive time. It's almost like now what we want to do is demonstrate through an activity that we have had free time rather than just sitting and having a period of time in which nothing was accomplished. But that doesn't mean it's lazy, it doesn't mean it was slovenly, it just means that it was time.

I love the phrase free time. As I hear the word free time, I hear jazz. When I think about jazz, I think a lot about the drummers. This idea that music and sound can make time free. I love improvisatory three music. I love the space they make for people to be free. Really links to people like Milford Graves.

We get back to that old dang danga dang stuff, but you got to know when you start feeling it, you got to go more than (skatting).

He believed in the power of the physicality of rhythm and its power to connect to our bodies and be embodied. Rhythm, time, and bass are central figures, and percussion features in all of my work.

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The drum got banned in the Caribbean, and it got banned because of its ability to communicate, and communicating it's time to resist. It got banned for its power. We rehearse our relationship to freedom and for freedom in music.

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So I think in terms of a soft life and what we would need to do to time to be able to experience soft time or a soft life, then I think we really do need to decouple the association between time and productivity. It's difficult, I think, to have a truly free attitude, a truly soft attitude, towards something that you know is finite. Look at your life, look at how you're using your time, and say to yourself, "Does this make me feel good? These things that I am doing, why am I doing them? How do they make me feel when I'm doing them? Do I really need to do them, or can I not do them?"

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When will we all feel freer? The idea that free time is something we have to create. That's what I kind of do within the installations that I can create space. That is the work that we have to do, is to think about freeing up time from mean time.

This is impersonal. This is impersonal politics. We're speaking about deep time. We're speaking about aeons, and I'm not just talking about time as a stretch, as a uniform sprawl of space. We're speaking about the very engines and machines that create reality.

In hearing soft life, I hear it's opposite. I think so much about how hard life can be for so many people, and what other ways in which I and others can soften life from oppressions, from the hardness of grind cultures. What are the ways in which we can soften life for one another? I big up all those people who are attempting to create soft lives for themselves. I just hope that in our creations of our softer versions of life, that we think about what are the hard lives that are cushioning our soft life. Progress isn't an end point if it's that we look nothing like we have done before. That ancient time is future time and future time is now.

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Thanks to Professor Judy Wiseman, Dr. Ruth Ogden, Shenece Oretha, and Bayo Akomolafe. Soft Life is produced by Alannah Chance and Axel Kacoutie, with sound by Axel Kacoutie. I'm Leonara Manyangadze, Senior Programmer for Somerset House Studios.