Jenny Odell on Timing Our Lives in Rhythm With the Earth

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

How we experience time is, ultimately, how we experience our lives. In this conversation with Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she describes the social and cultural ideas that underpin our sense of standardized, mechanized time, which has laid an abstract grid over the living world. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we allowed ourselves to slip free of the grip of linear, predictable chronos time and be swept into dynamic, interruptive kairos time?

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Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist, writer, and educator. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Sierra Magazine. She is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, a New York Times bestseller; and Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Marjorie Barrick Museum, Les Rencontres D’Arles, and Fotomuseum Antwerpen. She has been an artist in residence at the Internet Archive, the Recology dump in San Francisco, and the Montalvo Arts Center and has taught digital art at Stanford University.