If labor comprises merely the “act of consuming time,” does it still qualify as labor? If time can be neither filled nor accelerated, how do we make sense of this void?

Waiting ___ : An Art / Action Project on Idle Time stems from the 2017-2019 art project Here We Stand, building upon a long-term artistic inquiry into human billboard labor, the state of time, and urban space. Human billboards—workers holding real estate advertisements on the streets—exist simply as appendages to the signs they carry, and the act of passing time becomes the very substance of their labor. At a time when artificial intelligence and automation are rapidly infiltrating people’s quotidian existence, work is being redefined as procedures to be optimized or replaced, making “precarity” a shared condition for the majority. The imagery of human billboards seems to foreshadow a critical state for workers, pointing toward a sense of temporal disorder widely felt in contemporary society.

Located in the city’s prime urban core, C-LAB serves as the base for this project. In addition to field surveys, we will organize workshops and a labor-themed lecture series, so as to develop participatory creative forms that allow diverse workers to engage and interact. Co-organized with “PyroImage,” the workshops invite professionals from various fields who are acutely aware of their own labor conditions to engage in a creative process anchored in collective collaboration.

Through artistic action, can we transmute these lone figures standing beneath billboards and their seemingly idle time into perceivable “leisure,” viz., room for listening, observing, and contemplating? By doing so, this project seeks to initiate a new understanding of labor and community dynamism while exploring the creative potential of “amateurs.”