We live in a time where urban technology monitors and manages traf c, tracks pollution and crime, optimizes operations, saves mon- ey, improves public services and maximizes on citizen’s time. Cities around the world are building sensor networks and getting smarter, remodeling industrial regions into postindustrial centers for digital design and fabrication. Digital fabrication has de ned an evolution in the way we conceive, manufacture and distribute products, and also, it has shifted the notion of design itself towards a culture of making.
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In its core principles, the collective Beirut Makers asks how emerg- ing digital technologies are altering the processes of design, from conception to production, and how makers have now shifted their position in relation to design and production – just as design pi- oneers in the early 20th century shifted their posture, inspired by emerging industrial and manufacturing methods.
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But we live in the 21st century now, with a wider array of urgent issues: environmental responsibility, economic crises, migration, cit- ies and global development, the need to take account of ethical and social issues, and, not least, cultural relativeness. While digital fabrication has been an important consideration in the past Beirut Makers interventions, this year’s exhibition is not only about the in- novative nature of digital tools, but also about how it has sparked the creativity of the makers. The exhibition performs a shift in criteria towards the intention, with projects that speak of inclusive impact and transformations in the way we live and design. Together, the makers’ projects are the visible course for the questions we face in our time and our city.
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Today more and more people live in cities, and our fast-paced world of automation and optimization prioritizes speed and ef ciency. Yet the wellbeing of city residents could be highly improved by slow- ing down. “ABOUT TIME” is not only about establishing sustain- able living with a slower pace for movement, traf c or living in public spaces. It is about taking the time, seizing space, appreciating the weather, connecting to nature, being conscious of source and prov- enance, understanding and supporting local traditions and crafts. It is even about embracing idleness. “ABOUT TIME” puts forward a series of works that connects the abstract with the concrete, the digital with the material, the city with the home. It incorporates time, delays and pauses, and ordinary life as conditions for a city that is more environmentally sound, more serene, more fun, and ultimately more kind...
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The time has come for the new makers who will address the en- vironmental, economic and social crises, and create more kindly, responsible, and ethical ways of using emerging technologies
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Laissez-moi me balancer et je vous donne tout le temps
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Three-part kinetic design: a swing, a turbine, a clock. In this installation, motion and balance are the forces used to create time. “let me sway and I will give you time” , “let me balance and I will create moments”. Laissez-moi me balancer et je vous donne tout le temps is an object that captures time, it shifts it, stops it, slows it down. It uses motion and repetition to power a clock. It calls upon an ordinary object of our childhood, a simple low-tech system, and achieves a familiar and seamless amalgam of obvious opposites: wasting time and making time / motion and balance / high-tech and low tech / energy and gravity / abstract and concrete / fast and slow. We live in fast paced cities and time is equal to money. This project is conceived in response to the changing dynamic of life in the city. It is part of a new process aimed towards the need to slow down, embracing time and latency, powering the clock and powering people to take the time to balance.
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written by: Valérie Nseir
published in BDW, About Time Exhibition