The Lost Hour

Set the timer and get ready because on the eve of Daylight Saving Time we asked artists and audiences – if you could get away with it, what would you do with the hour that gets lost?

The Lost Hour was a month long programme of activity featuring dares, performances and a durational exhibition online, in which artists and audiences were asked to confront the public vs private space, shirk their online history and shun the panopticon of surveillance.

Artist Addie Wagenknecht kick-started The Lost Hour programme with a visual investigation on the role of group thinking around public decisions to reveal or conceal private information via online work This Connection is Untrusted, as internationally renowned icon of underground culture John Law prepared to deliver The Challenge to a new generation of creative troublemakers.

Then, on 31 Oct the premiere of Trevor Paglen’s Circles was screened at ICA, coinciding with the nationwide release of Laura Poitras’ nerve shooting documentary about whistle blower Edward Snowden, CITIZENFOUR. This new artwork, commissioned by BRITDOC and Abandon Normal Devices, features Britain’s GCHQ as its focal point.

This programme of events was inspired by “The Right to be Forgotten” campaign which sparked in 2010 when a Spanish citizen lodged a complaint with the National Data Protection Agency against Google Spain and Google inc. Since then the campaign has spawned debates, discussions, articles and EU wide rulings about our privacy rights and how our personal data is archived and accessed online.

The Lost Hour was a golden ticket to an otherwise invisible world, where you were invited to waive or welcome your right to privacy and celebrate the ephemerality of the lived experience.

Partners included Link Cabinet, The Influencers (Barcelona) and BRITDOC.

Up to August 2016, Masters & Servers will explore networked culture in the post-digital age, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), AND (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES).

This project was funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.