Pockets, Waves and Slips: Leaking Time in 25/7

By Helen Kaplinsky, 17.6.26

An extra hour has been made available to Kalasatama residents. The implant sits just below the navel. A technology pilot scheme in Helsinki's flagship smart-city district, it grants residents exclusive access to an additional 25th hour each day.

Artist Flis Holland's sound walk 25/7, in collaboration with composer Juuli Haverinen and commissioned by Helsinki Art Museum, unfolds through fragments of phone conversations scattered across Kalasatama Park. Part of A Stream among Streams, an ensemble of four public artworks for the Kalasatama district, the work emerges from a curatorial approach that combines art and research to explore intersections between humanity and technology.[1] As subjects of a so-called “living lab”, the characters in Holland’s work adjust to the implant and discover its increasingly erratic behaviour. For one, time arrives in bursts and surges; while for another, it gathers gradually like a swell of waves, slipping under the radar of temporal administration.

Translating as "fishing port", the Helsinki suburb of Kalasatama has undergone dramatic transformation over the past fifteen years, trading its fishing and cargo industries for a new identity built around mall shopping and smart-city residential living. From 2013–2021, the City of Helsinki and its innovation company Forum Virium Helsinki developed Smart Kalasatama Urban Living Lab, using the district as a testing ground for experimental forms of smart urban development. “Agile pilots” tested on residents included sensors that track waste, a virtual psychologist, and a smart ring that measures users' nervous systems. The developers behind Smart Kalasatama boast: "Time is city residents' most precious resource, which is why Smart Kalasatama aims to manage time efficiently, too. The vision, created together with local residents and other stakeholders, is for everyone to gain an extra hour of free time every day."[2] The branding campaign takes temporal productivity to an absurd limit. A seemingly simple play on language, 25/7 narrates what feels like a high point of extractive urbanism by asking: what happens when this rhetoric of surreal optimisation is literalised?

In Holland's narrative, the additional hour is available only to those with a Kalasatama resident permit. Commuters and visitors living beyond the smart zone are excluded. The implant carries a warning that "minor blurring or muffling may occur" when residents and non-residents, occupying different temporalities, interact. Yet the malfunctions exceed expectations. The tool for temporal administration gradually opens to alternate possibilities; time leaks, swells, and escapes the systems designed to contain it. While this plot twist might appear to be sci-fi genre fiction, each element is a re-telling of everyday experiences in an alternate guise. The technology plays on existing modes of governance such as biometric monitoring, productivity optimisation, and differential access through administrative permissions. Even the central, seemingly far-fetched premise that time can stretch, is based on the lived experiences of people today. There is a striking alignment between the description of pockets, waves, and slips in time created by the implant and how crip-time has been compared to time-travel, bending the clock to meet disabled bodies.[3] Through this lens, 25/7 can be received not as an invented narrative but instead a window into and commentary on experiences that exceed temporal normativity and the fixedness of administrative boundaries.

Urban, crip and hyp time

In the race to capture resources, time included, the urban developers' vision of ceaseless productivity is a fantasy of unlimited progress. Time is quantified, performed, and surveilled to conform to the city’s infrastructure. This story emerged in the modern era, with mass migration of populations from the countryside to urban centers in Western Europe, a process that continues globally. At the turn of the century, German sociologist Georg Simmel articulated how the smooth running of train schedules and factory shifts replaced seasonal synchronicity. He identified the introduction of the pocket watch as key to the particularly urban phenomena of modern, normative, industrial time.[4] In Simmel’s analysis, quantitative economic rationale overrules qualitative, affective expressions of value. Towards the beginning of 25/7, one resident comments on how they have thus far used their extra hour. Whilst they initially tried to “do nothing”, guilt soon crept in; surely they couldn’t just waste it? Despite Smart Kalasatama’s aim to provide additional leisure time for residents, the 25th hours are eventually swallowed by the logic of efficiency, another opportunity for wage labour. 

However, Holland’s story is not simply a satire of the apogee of chrono-capitalism. It also reveals other ways of inhabiting time. Crip theorists have described time not as linear progress but as pockets, loops, and suspended moments. It bends with illness, pauses in exhaustion, skips over imagined futures. Crip-time expounds and advocates for embodied experiences of time which most often appear as an irregularity to be accommodated, or ignored, within normative blueprints.

Since being diagnosed with a recurrent disease, a genetic defect, my relationship to time has felt perpetually fragmented and out-of-joint. A breakdown in my integration as a cog in the machine, I have drifted into pockets of anxious conspiratorial speculation about my potential for malfunction. In Finnish, the term for hypochondria luulosairas translates as ‘imaginary illness’, although attempts to destigmatise have led to the parallel introduction of an apparently moderating but emotionally led phrase sairauspelko - ‘fear of illness’.[5] While sick people are categorically sanctioned to make a dignified exit from the productivity cycle, those who fabricate sickness are the worst - useless, and emotionally self-involved. A social burden of wasted time. 

Susannah Mintz, who has written extensively from experiences of pain and disability, reframes hypochondria as a profound mode of embodied communication. An openness and knowledge about the susceptibility of bodies to unexpected impingement. Hyp-time, which riffs on crip-time, describes temporal asynchronicity that occurs outside medical visibility.[6] Slipping a little further, aside from the very categorisations of sick/well, those who live in hyp-time can’t coerce themselves to the rhythm of tick/tock, even when scientific measures tell them they are ready to rejoin the urban engine. 

Time, at what cost?

Alongside, and sometimes cutting through the voices of residents are compositions by Juuli Haverinen, that incorporate field recordings from the area. Mics that pick up electromagnetic frequency (EMF), convert the usually silent signals of the smart city infrastructure into audible wave forms. Whilst X-rays and radiation for cancer therapy are known to damage DNA, EMF, known as ‘non-ionizing radiation’, an energy that is emitted from Wi-Fi, phones, microwaves, and power lines, is weaker and therefore cannot break molecular bonds. However, there has been speculation about harmful interaction between bodies and the waves that pass through them. In the early 2020s, a conspiracy that fifth-generation mobile technology is a health hazard, a new world order plot, and even spreads COVID led to the vandalisation of telephone masts, harassment of engineers installing fibre optics, and a statement from the WHO, attempting to calm nerves about the fear of radiation poisoning. The global propagation and spread of this apparently irrational way of knowing about a virus and a new technology is aphonenia - the perception of patterns between unrelated phenomena. Like hyp-epistemology, both reflect a hyper-awareness of the porosity of bodies and are expressions of vulnerability in the face of unknown unknowns.[7]

Phone calls between loved ones, with and without implants, on opposite sides of the administrative boundary of Kalasatama reflect societal debates about interactions with novel technologies. For whom is it a source of anxiety and for whom is it an opportunity? Some bodies are more accustomed to being dependent on technology, medicines and machines that measure and integrate with everyday bodily functions. For others, it might feel like an additional risk to have yet another potentially unstable interaction alongside existing treatments or regimens. Even for people without these factors, there is a generalised apprehension, reflected in the emergence of conspiracies. Such concerns are unsurprising given the complexity of digital technologies, which are evolving exponentially beyond human comprehension. The pilot implant in 25/7 can therefore be read as a parable that sketches the stakes for humans with diverse embodied experiences and limited insight into the technological entanglements they embody.  

Hacking chrono-capitalism 

Gradually, the optimized inhabitants begin to gain confidence interacting with and manipulating the glitching implant. When a critical mass of implant-fitted residents collectivise their desire, when it is probed and pressed, it's possible to lean into the breach and generate not just one additional hour but whole fields of time spanning days, then weeks, perhaps longer. This choral hack performs a leap from an apocalyptic vision of complete quantification and alienation to grounded political and coalitional selves. Thus, the biopolitical body shifts from extreme individualisation to a proposition for a techno-somatic commons.

According to first-order cybernetics, such entanglement of the self with other factors, such as the 25/7 implant, is a feedback loop with information flowing in both directions, a call and response between self/other creating iterative mutations. However, in 25/7 the distinction between objects/subject, inside/outside, self/other gradually dissolves. The bodies of residents evolve into a primordial soup of interacting agents, an ecosystem where wild bacteria and viruses can settle and begin to prosper. The corporate ‘living-lab’ that arranges and extracts value from biological life becomes a more soupy, horizontal model. The control function of nodes is redirected to formulate diagonal connections. The malfunctioning implants speak not only to, but also with, the bodies they are assigned to control. This meeting of silicone and flesh unfolds into a messy, DIY, experiment, beyond the supervision of urban developers. Unplanned and unpredictable, it is likely far from the sanitised enterprise that Smart Kalasatama had in mind.

The time/space of characters in tactical coalition arises from the repurposing of the very technological materials usually associated with temporal oppression. The unreality of urban developer marketing reaches the limit of its logic and so becomes something else. Sound is a fitting medium through which to write this wild astray movement, to an elsewhere - an opaque zone beyond administration. Like EMF, sound is a wave that moves through borders, administrative strictures that define different bodies into identitarian categories and culturally specific norms. Vibrations exceed an originary sonic event and so are experienced as a delay. Thus, the hearing occupies another temporal zone.[8]

Endnotes

[1] A Stream among Streams was curated by Aleksandra Kiskonen and Kristiina Ljokkoi from the Public Art Unit of the Helsinki Art Museum.

‘An ensemble of public artworks will spread across the Kalasatama district and explores the intersection between humanity and technology employing an approach combining art and research’. 2023. Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), February 15. https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/stories/an-ensemble-of-public-artworks-will-spread-across-the-kalasatama-district-and-explores-the-intersection-between-humanity-and-technology-employing-an-approach-combining-art-and-research/ .

[2] Fiksu Kalasatama (Smart Kalasatama). 2025. ‘One More Hour not as an invented narrative but as a window into and commentary on experiences that exceed temporal normativity and the fixedness of a Day’. Helsinki, Finland, April 16.https://fiksukalasatama.fi/en/building-blocks/one-more-hour-a-day/.

[3] Samuels compares crip-time to time travel and cites her friend Alison Kafer thus "rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." Kafer, Alison. Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013 cited by Samuels, Ellen. 2017. ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’. Disability Studies Quarterly 37 (3). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824.

[4] “The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one. The calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money economy corresponds to the ideal of natural science, namely that of transforming the world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical formula. It has been money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms. Because of the character of calculability which money has there has come into the relationships of the elements of life a precision and a degree of certainty in the definition of the equalities and inequalities and an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements, just as externally this precision has been brought about through the general diffusion of pocket watches. It is, however, the conditions of the metropolis which are cause as well as effect for this essential characteristic.” 

Simmel, Georg. 1971. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)’. In On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited by Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press. https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/wilhelmine-germany-and-the-first-world-war-1890-1918/georg-simmel-the-metropolis-and-mental-life-1903.

[5] Duodecim Terveyskirjasto. 2025. ‘Sairauspelko eli hypokondria’. April 16. https://www.terveyskirjasto.fi/dlk00415.

[6] Mintz, Susannah B. 2026. Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story. Reaktion Books, Limited.

[7] In 2002 US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously responded to a question about evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: "Reports that say that something hasn’t happened, are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.  And so people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened or is not being tried, have capabilities that are -- what was the word you used, Pam, earlier? 

[Pam Hess, Reporter] Q: Free associate? (laughs)

Rumsfeld: Yeah. They can -- (chuckles) -- they can do things I can't do. (laughter)

Q: Excuse me. But is this an unknown unknown?

Rumsfeld: I'm not --

Q: Because you said several unknowns, and I'm just wondering if this is an unknown unknown.

Rumsfeld: I'm not going to say which it is.”

[8] “I pick up on a sound (a beat, a word, a cry, a pitch) and attend to it with a far larger temporal attention span than the time span of the sonic cue. A beat, a beat in the hearing  - but the two events (of the sound and its hearing) Do not occupy the same temporality. I love this as much as I am confused by it. That a detail can last a lifetime. This is sonorous tense. A tense that is elastic time. Peculiar. As soon I say now it is not.” Finer, Ella. 2024. ‘Acoustic Attention, Deep Affiliation and the Work of Listening’. In Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin. Silver Press, pp.112.

This essay is also inspired by Ella Finer’s wider research towards her forthcoming book ‘Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound’ (Berlin: Errant Bodies) which traces stories of sound escaping archives and buildings. Radosavljević, Duška; Pitrolo, Flora; Salazar Cardona, Juan Felipe; Finer, Ella (2021) LMYE Library #2: Ella Finer - Acoustic Commons, Auralia.Space, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, https://doi.org/10.25389/rcssd.14014166.v1

Inclusive Sans by Olivia King is a friendly personality text font designed for accessibility and readability. Downloadable for free here: https://www.design-research.be/by-womxn/