Hyundai Blue Prize Art + Tech 2022: The Polychronicity in Blockchain

BI Xin’s Hyundai Blue Prize Art + Tech 2022 exhibition Time After Time: The Polychronicity in Blockchain responded to the theme “Disruptive Futures,” investigating a new timeframe in the data space based on the concept of blockchain.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, our subjective experience of time drastically changed, becoming an elastic existence that seemingly paused, folded, extended, and regressed. Despite the challenges this brought, the situation had positive implications. It reminded us that we are not the only agents of history and deepened our appreciation for the complexities within the dimension of time.

In the COVID era of “no future,” how do we understand the latency, differences, and repetition of time? How do we reconsider time beyond metrics and computation? How do we perceive the traces left behind by technology in the spacing of time?

The exhibition engaged with these questions by attempting to search for a new timeframe modeled after blockchain, “a data space impregnated with a topological arrow of time.” The exhibition unfolded using three parallel networks of time—Chimera, Energy, and Spime—each symbolizing a unique aspect of temporal experience. Chimera Time, labeled as Algorithm-Time, explored the probabilistic nature of time through blockchain technology. Energy Time, or Ecology-Time, critically engaged with the conflicts and interdependencies between technological development and ecological balance. Spime, known as Social Connection-Time, merged the boundaries between time and space, examining the evolution of political, emotional, and community connections and the interpenetration of the digital and physical worlds.

Through these lenses, the exhibition posited that block time—a concept derived from blockchain that signifies discrete segments of time—offers an opportunity for us to reconceptualize time’s fabric. It offered a view of how these different networks of time could unfold into a web of futures. Together, these networks scrutinized the current temporal, social, and political orders, the construction of consensus mechanisms, how energy and emotion circulates, and how technology creates shifts or slippages in our experience of time, the “forks of time,” and the poetry of technology.

During the exhibition, visitors were encouraged to pause and envision our shared future at a time of rapid and unexpected changes and engage in the discourse through corresponding public programs.