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Bacardi Time Machine” is a reflection on my subjective experience of time under capitalism and the warping of time that occurs with cycles of sustained alcohol consumption and addiction. An inescapable translation of time into labour time creates constant looming anxiety that colours all activities both inside and outside the structured work week. Strangely, sustained alcohol consumption accelerates time, condensing months into a single sustained moment. I suspect the way it does this is by creating an indifference to time, breaking its ties with labour time. Though cycles of addiction may not be a direct response to living under capitalism, they are inextricably linked.

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In a review of Ole Berg’s “Drug Addiction and Capitalism: Too Close To The Body”, Matilda Hellman* reflects: “The illusion of the capitalist ideology is the satisfaction of desire, the ‘filling’ of the gap in the being of the self. Again, a precondition is that the subject’s needs and desires are bred on the level of fantasy and are never to be actually realised. Addiction is the state when we have come too close to the objects, when the capitalist fantasy no longer is appealing, and when the self will channel its needs into other circulations. The self has come to be ‘too close to capitalism’, and the shortage seeks expression in an individual state of mania.”

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The loss of addiction is as significant a risk as the continuance of addiction. To meditate on these relationships, I create generative data visualizations from personal documentation of my own cycles of addiction. Historically, data visualizations have been laden with corporate baggage for me, having been used to obscure and manipulate for the sake of profit. In this project, I believe in their ability to be healing and mysterious, uncovering patterns and connections that I could not expect.

* "Where there is capitalism, there shall be addiction" - Matilda Hellman - Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (page 283, volume 27) - 2010.