“For millennia one had measured oneself against the cycles of the seasons and the heavens, or against changing social mores and geopolitical configurations. To now be compelled to measure one’s life against the pace of machine time invited madness.”
In this long-form essay by Seth Price, a “cultured middle aged artist from New York” attends a winter solstice party at an “open-air, tropical-Modern” island villa hosted by a man named Trader, “tanned, with a graying mane, khakis, trainers, and a billowing linen Oxford.” The real drama of this story, however, is arguably the “practice of divesting and reinvesting meaning” in our world of signs, a world whose semiotic layer is undergoing an epochal shift .. or so it seems. // This ep is part 1 of 2.
“Machine Time” by Seth Price was first published in Heavy Traffic I (2022). We bring you this reading as part of Heavy Traffic’s New Models residency, which features essays from the magazine read aloud by their authors.
For a conversation with Heavy Traffic publisher, Patrick McGraw, see NM75.
For more information and to pre-order copies of Heavy Traffic issue IV, see heavytrafficmagazine.com (note: issues, I, II, III are sold out).
