Process Archive for Total Running Time
Artist Process
Josephine Sales is an artist working in time-based media, sculpture, and performance to consider the relational capacities of disability, dependency and debility. The archive page contains research that informs Total Running Time, guided by a disability oriented approach that treats images as indexical markers—evidence of how access is organized, withheld, or felt.
Central Time Clock
An image of the exterior door of “Central Time Clock,” a labor-time tracking device provider that boasts “helping effectively manage employees and control labor costs.”
Sonic study
An image of a white document depicting six different illustrations- two wide by three tall. Each illustration depicts a rough waveform for a corresponding sound. The sounds are [thump], [breathing], [ringing] short pulses l/r delay, [touchtone], [triggering] operator, and [constant] voice 1.
Time shred
An image of the rear door of an 18-wheeler trailer on the road. Black printed text is obstructed by vertical frames. The text reads “Time Shred Services inc. Mobile Document Destruction, www.timeshred.com, 718 875-1200, 1800 989-8463”.
World
An image of a pale, off-white piece of sheet metal with decal residue spelling the word “world”. The metal’s screws line the left edge of the image.
Sketchbook 11, Sketch of Two Clocks, 1986 by Donald Rodney
An image of white text on a dark blue background with a white border. The text reads, “One clock is inscribed ‘Past’ and ‘Imperfect’. The other clock is inscribed ‘Future looks’”
Fourth Amendment AI
An image depicting a computer node map of 40 AI response choices around the Fourth Amendment.
Haptics in wall
A photo of a printed document titled “Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline'' next to a handwritten note which reads, “haptics into wall??” The note also has a small hand-drawing of a rectangle on it.
Ice Light
An image depicting six photographs laid out on a piece of wood. Each of the six photos show a large rectangular slab of ice in a sink and in front of a freezer. In the first two photographs, the ice slabs are illuminated by an orange light.
Mouser policy
A document outlining “Mouser Electronics” standards on slavery and human trafficking in the supply chain.
Power Generation
An image depicting the side of a tan-colored building with the text “Power Generation” written in black on its face.
Pulses still
An image of a video still with a solid gray background. Closed caption text with a yellow fill and black outline reads “to refuse this call, press 2 [a slight crackle on the line]”.
Rescue material study
An image of a grey, smooth surface with a pile of grey powder and transparent, spherical beads in varying sizes. The beads appear to glow.
Biography
Josephine Sales is an artist working in time-based media, sculpture, and performance to consider the relational capacities of disability, dependency, and debility. Treating access as both material and method, Sales allows the viewer to shape how the work circulates, engages, or lingers by opening multiple points of entry. Sales’ work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kai Matsumiya; and The Shed. Recent engagements include an Artist in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts (2021–2023), and participation in E.A.A.T., Experiments in Art, Access and Technology at the Beall Center for Art + Technology. (2023-2024). Sales received an MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery School of the Arts and a BA in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College, and currently teaches in the School of Art, Media, and Technology (AMT) at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
Project Description
Total Running Time comprises four works that use disrupted social and sensorial gestures to examine the entanglement of incarceration, disability, labor, and the extraction of time. Across relief sculpture, a telephone call through the prison telecommunications system, and expanded cinema, Rescue, Pulses, and Day for Night stage crises of care, surveillance, and temporal disorientation. Total Running Time Site extends the installation as a digital sourcebook on loan to UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology, linking the physical works with a remote space for continued engagement.