Micro-Commuting: Being Home as an Architecture of Personal Time

A Drawing Project by Paul Beuchat for the Exhibition “Home”
Curated by Martin Rasmussen, London, 2009




As an artist and translator, I live and work at home and therefore the centre of my living space is my computer and my desk, which are in my room.

In our daily lives commuting, or the time we spend going to and from our workplace, determines to a large extent our priorities and the way we build our schedule, it defines our personal architectures of time so to speak.

Because I live and work at home, this commuting time disappears or is radically different proportionally to that of the average person, moving between public or physical geographies to personal geographies and micro-commuting.

Given, also, that in such circumstances landscape itself does not change (it is still primarily my home and surroundings), how we allocate our time, the itineraries of our everyday life become the most relevant aspect of our sense of home in terms of our identity.

If something is altered or goes wrong in our “feeding” routine, for example, this will have a short term impact on a major “beam” in the construct our life and identity, if on the other hand, such change occurs in our sleeping or social patterns of behaviour, the effect could be in the longer term, etc.

Micro-Commuting: Being Home as an Architecture of Personal Time – remits to the fact that not moving from home reduces my movements quantitatively and qualitatively from longer commuting times to brief, clearly identifiable and short distance displacements from my "real" centre (the desktop and my computer to various points and within the computer).

My relationship with that centre is expressed in a time-based drawing in the form of a slideshow that distinguishes between the "physical lines" and "digital lines” identifiable in my everyday life behaviour and reflecting the itinerary of such patterns of behaviour.

Micro-Commuting: Being Home as an Architecture of Personal Time is also a direct reference to George Perec’s The Apartment.

In the foreword for his book “Species of Spaces and other Places” (Penguin Books, Revised Edition, London 1999), Georges Perec points out that “the subject of this book is not the void exactly but rather what there is round or inside of it [...] To start with, then, there isn’t very much: nothingness, the impalpable, the virtually immaterial, extension, the external, what is external to us, what we move about in the midst of, our ambient milieu, the space around us.”

Distinguishing between physical and digital space, interior and exterior (outside my house, but still within its sphere of influence, such as going to the corner shop, launderette, etc.) and digital or communicational space (online), this project offers one possible visual representation of the surrounding space described by Perec in his book.

On this occasion, however, the space of Home has been organized around the void left by the absence of commuting time in my personal everyday life, represented according to my proximity or distance from the centre of my combined home and work life, which is the computer. This, however, is not a permanent state of affairs and must be viewed as a segment, a section of my life.

Conceptually, the immediate context of the project also engages notions such as that of the Cyborg (the extension of the capabilities of the human body through technology) and the notion of Space as Bandwidth as they are used William J.Mitchell in City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (MIT Press, 1999).

I have included Mitchell’s view of telephonic conversation as an asynchronous extension of personal space (as opposed to synchronous or direct face-to-face interaction) and the automobile as a historical extensions of the home in a mediated world for contextual reasons only.

Time is a void that MUST be filled (or shaped).

Time must be used, or wasted, but it will inevitably pass and there is no surplus and no interest to be gained by trying to hoard it. At our time of reckoning, like in double entry accounting, any time spent in our affairs will necessarily equal the time we had available to do them: our lifetime.

In the course of our daily affairs, we usually schedule our time according to a hierarchy, an order of precedence that is defined by need and availability. This arrangement of our lifetime, I argue, is a form of personal architecture that can be represented visually as a diary, schedule or as a graph.

The visual representation of these needs through lines is descriptive of personal space understood as how we use our time, a time-based cartography where habitation or the way we use a place (its regularity and/or intensity of use) provides an element of form (space) whose identity is defined by (our) allocation of time and also our frequency or intensity of circulation (personal habits or routine).

The computer at my desk is at the same time the focal point of my daily routine and also the boundary between physical and digital spaces (a kind of “black hole”).

Similarly, my mobile phone provides incoming and outgoing communications which could initiate the branching off of a secondary itinerary, for example, if I am on my way to the shop in the corner and I receive a call or send off a message.

My personal sense of “Home” revolves around the familiarity and centralness to my day of the office desk and specifically the computer, complemented by the multiple interactions of my personal relations. In this drawing, each line is allocated specific information value, to identify and explain movements and their relationship.

This value can be expressed in colour, form or other linear qualities, as in CAD (feeding lines, WC lines, sleeping lines) each one corresponding to a different sub-architecture and timeframe which combined with the others reflect the reality of my life in terms of my routine displacements and the aggregate time devoted to each type of movement within the space I have defined here as “home.”

The general outline of the flat space is only present in the introductory slide(s) and may or may not reflect the actual shape (as cartographic shape itself could be defined according to intensity of use in a way similar to a world map based on PGB or population figures) and the drawings will look like this more or less (except they will be made by hand and scanned), with all lines adding up to 24 hours (unless time is expressed in terms of unit-days, in which case a colour could be assigned to each segment of the line representing one day or one hour (within a day), as applicable).

© Paul Beuchat













Each block shape will provide statistical data (time devoted to shopping, WC, cooking, TV, sleeping, etc., over a period of one week (5 working) days.