Over the course of 24 hours, 527 cube requests were made and we were able to produce 356 cubes. Almost immediately after the project went live we realized that it would be much more difficult than we previously predicted to meet the demands of the viewers. Initially we believe that we would be able to fulfill all the requests when there was “down time” in the middle of the night. Due several countries from all time zones participating however, we never encountered anytime that was considered a real down time.

The only way the audience was able to communicate with us was through two fill out forms. The first asked “What is your name?”, and the second “Where are you from?”. Because we did not incorporate a contact page or a chat box for viewers to easily communicate with us, they began sending us messages through the form. There were messages of encouragement to questions about the project, to perverted comments.

Many viewers that know us personally tried to contact us by other forms of communication. We realized through these messages that many viewers were actually staying tuned in to find out whether their cubes had been made yet. Phone texts, e-mails, and facebook messages were also received asking whether their cubes had been made or whether we could save their cube for them. In many cases the viewers were personally invested in the production of their cube and desired to see the process of production in real time.

Along with the web camera embedded in www.cubinator.nl, we also had a second web camera live at all times in www.chatroulette.com . Chatroulette is a video chat website where two users are partnered together at random and the users and can choose whether they want to talk to their partner or hit “next” to see/chat with someone new. Though still a relatively new website, it has already received the reputation of place of sex and perversion. This theory proved to be true in the case of our online performance. Since we were constantly busy creating cubes, we did not interact with the chat rouletters by typing back to them, rather we automatically set our chat up so that users who landed on us can stay and observe the performance for as long as they liked and only when the user exited our conversation, we received a new chat session. Throughout the 24 hours, the majority of people we encountered were males masturbating to the sight of us creating cubes. A few inquired about the project and others typed that they would participate in commissioning a cube. Some hit our performance and stayed watching us create cubes for longer than 30 minutes, a few seemed very intrigued and almost hypnotized by our performance while others only stayed and watched our performance for a few seconds. We suspect that many of the more sexually implicit remarks left on our website possibly came from visitors on Chatroulette but it is impossible to decipher the actual source.

The aim of the performance was to expose the clash between actual time and space and the construction of a global online time and the 24 hours economy that is present in digital media. This also shows how our fantasy of an economy that does not include human limits and flaws does not coincide with our biological rhythms, and triggers us to reconsider our expectations. Though we are not able to test (yet) if this has been achieved in our audience, we can certainly say that something has happened to us during the performance. We were not conscious of how lack of sleep, isolation in a close environment, video monitoring and repetitive endless work can alter our behavior and our way of thinking and relating to each other and to the rest of the world (the outside world).

On a more superficial level, this absurd experience has strikingly altered all our biological stimuli and daily rhythms for days; stimuli like tiredness and hunger tent to disappear, and appear in the most unexpected time. Also we both experienced a decreased sense of reality and real consequences to our actions, or decreased inhibition in communication and decision making in “real life”. We both felt more open and spontaneous and had the feeling to be changed after the experience. On a deeper level, there was a moment during the performance that the space and time settings we were in became completely overwhelming and took over our sense of reality. There was a time when we started to lose contact with our audience, we didn’t know what time it was, the light outside felt completely neutral and there were no sounds coming from the street. The white space we were immersed in felt completely out of reality, our time was only defined by the action of making cubes. It was impossible to comprehend that this experience would at some point end, we would know it on an intellectual level but we would feel like this was not a confined experience, rather our reality and that it would continue endlessly.

We think that this nearly hallucinating state has been achieved through lack of sleep and isolation but also the endless and continuous repletion of an action with no real purpose. It could somehow relate to Kubler’s theorization of time perception, where perception of time is defined by change rate in objects and actions. The repetiton of the same action over and over, with no apparent evolution in time and no purpose might have contributed to the distortion of our sense of reality.