Time Well Spent is both an art-work (2018) and a durational research-creation workshop (2022+) by Jessica Foley. 

So, I decided to take a Gantt chart from one of the unsuccessful proposals (the IRC one) and to make a cross-stitch piece of it. It was an intuitive decision, a humorous and practical  way to process my experience and open onto other thoughts, feelings and images. It was a serious joke that allowed me to ruminate on what kind of imagination, what kind of language, what kind of mood or attitude is required for someone like me to actually make sense and meaning within the space of technological research, in a way that mattered personally, publicly and politically. 
At the same time as cross-stitching the Gantt chart, I was thinking about the affects (or somaesthics even) of the irrealis mood in Irish/Gaeilge, through the Modh Coinníolach. I was interested in the affect/effect of this mood/tense in the Irish language and how it seemed to reflect a prevailing mood/tense within technological research. While it seemed to be a mood that echoed the speculative narratives surrounding technologies like ‘Smart Cities’ and ‘Internet of Things’, it is also (I think) a mood of decolonisation… it feels subversive, slippery — at once compliant with and resisting whatever prevailing narrative or authority is in power. The modh coinníollach felt to me to be in the same register as Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature, and I wanted to follow that feeling (without theorising too much).

Jessica Foley

It began as a textile and audio art-work, exhibited as part of Difference Engine IX: ALTERN_ATORS, in HDLU, Zagreb, 2018. This exhibition was a collaborative composition that sought to generate and perform artistic differences within a gallery context, drawing audiences into relation with them. The mood of ALTERN_ATORS was charged with a consciousness of worldly and other-worldly agency and change. 

For DE IX: ALTERN_ATORS, I presented two individual works Time Well Spent (cross-stitched Gantt chart) and Worldizing in the Módh Coinníollach (audio interview/sound). Both of these works are responses to a contemporary mood, one shaped by rapid technological and environmental/climate change, pervasive wars and intellectual, emotional and political inertia. Collectively, within the exhibition and amongst my sister artists’ works , they formed a constellation of provocation and response to an everyday increasingly conditioned by anti-democratic politics, predictive policing algorithms, mass surveillance and grotesque technological consumerism, irresponsibility and waste. 

Time Well Spent extends these concerns. It is a research-creation project that aims to awaken within academic communities “the capacity to make change in existing conditions” (Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry). Through research-creation workshops, the conventions, technologies and lived experiences (somaesthetics) of knowledge-formation, teaching and research are gently yet firmly brought into question through needlework and hand-craft, poetry, and conversation.

My intention is to host a number of Time Well Spent sessions, as the occasions arise. So far, I’ve hosted two sessions, one at IADT Library and one at TCD in the Provost’s house (image above).

I am also happy to respond to calls to devise and facilitate bespoke Time Well Spent workshops for individuals, institutions and groups. For my part, I am interested in Time Well Spent becoming a semi-autonomous meeting-place where people working within/against academia can share ideas, raise questions and think together through the craft of making cross-stitch. I call this a practice of withnessing. It becomes a meeting-place founded upon principles of mutual respect, reciprocity, openness and feminist citation.