While walking through the Musee du Quebec a couple of years ago, I came across an installation that conjured up the feeling of a 1950’s American soda shop – vinyl-covered stools and neon – with a clock on the wall.

I stopped.

What was a clock doing in a museum? I realized that I had already spent nearly two hours there. Clearly, the museum, like the casino and the church, is meant to be a place in which visitors lose time. As you walk though the doors, you have a transcendent experience – and enter another world.

The clock ripped me out of that space. We had dinner reservations, more sights to see, perhaps some shopping. I had other things to do. I know that I consented to the expenditure of my time; I had decided to attend the museum. Now, I found myself anxious to get out. Our eyes were tired at that point, and the rest of the gallery did not look like anything we needed to see. We left shortly thereafter.

As museums became more obvious consumer spaces (What blockbuster exhibition does not have a gift shop at the end of it? And conversely, what about the transplant of The Museum Store in your friendly neighborhood shopping mall?), I would argue that they drifted away from their supposed sacredness toward a more mundane --or maybe just less rarified--existence.

As with the museum, we have seen the commercialization of the Web, too. What was once the realm of the government and researchers has now become the world’s largest department store. Instead of the egalitarian, digital utopia that was once promised, we now have to click through a multitude of pop-up and pop-under windows to get at the content for which we went looking.

In her 1988 article, “I’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Fake,” Margaret Crawford proposed that the shopping mall, theme park, and television manipulate time and space by removing us from the "ordinary" world. By extension, her conception of television can certainly be expanded to include today's World Wide Web. How frequently are we lost while surfing the Net? I know I find time missing after having been online. We are sedentary flaneurs, and I wonder what Walter Benjamin might make of our 21st century digital arcades.

There have been plenty of attempts to turn the Web into a museum, but I think we can all agree that the two “spaces” are not meant to mimic each other. Yet, the Web has become an entirely different venue in which we can experience art – hence your visit here. Unfettered by the limitations of a brick and mortar building, the freedoms of cyberspace, however, do bring their own challenges for the artist.

An Hour of Your Time ponders the conventions of "time" and "the museum," and reconfigures these as to be experienced via the Net. I intend to frustrate the viewer, to make her anxious about watching the piece. The countdown timer ticks the hour away, leading to an eventual end. “Will I stay to watch this whole thing?” the viewer asks. Most of our activity online is comprised of quick clicks and nanoseconds spent on uninteresting sites before we move on, while An Hour asks that you stay for an hour.

One way of looking at the piece is that it is slow: an hour is a long time in 2003. However, the converse is true as well – the frantic pace at which the suggestions flick by make the work seem hectic. These move by too fast to comprehend in bunches, let alone consider each one. Exhausting to watch, too slow and too fast, it is like the endurance performances of the 60s and 70s, coupled with the staccato rhythms of a Vertov film.

The result is a piece that asks something unusual – that the viewer be aware of the time he is spending watching it; that he be aware of the multitude of other things he could accomplish in that hour. How long will you watch?

Have a good time.