Document:Q10479

PAN-O-MATIC = panoramic + automatic
PAN-O-MATIC recognizes the contemporary urbanite's struggle to maintain societal illusions of speed and efficiency. Fully immersed in an environment of rigid, mechanized technological systems, the urbanite exists in an environment that controls without giving agency. As a tactic to confront and question the current situation, PAN-O-MATIC deploys interactive projects into public spaces such as street-level storefronts and the internet. The interactions appropriate popular advertising strategies and expose the relationships between notions of routine and efficiency and manufactured desires.
PAN-O-MATIC.com leverages the internet's public space as both venue and tool for investigating the ways in which our society defines and idealizes productivity and efficiency. Appropriating strategies currently used in advertising, popular lifestyle magazines and self-help publications,
PAN-O-MATIC.com explores the history and received notions of work versus leisure time with regards to westernized obsessions with maximization.
Consisting of short anecdotal interviews from the general public, the site includes monthly spotlights on topics such as computerized dining systems and time saving holiday shopping strategies. The "Efficiency Elsewhere" section features an ongoing collection of personal efficiency tactics.
The site also provides users with the ability to assess their own time management through PAN-O-MATIC's online self-evaluation tool, the PAN-O-MATIC DayRunner. After completing a short multiple choice survey of their daily routine, the user is rewarded with a spectacle of moving images and sound reflective of their particular lifestyle.
As an ongoing project, future plans include a more comprehensive comparative analysis of cross-cultural notions of time management and efficiency, an email subscription service that will offer weekly tips, a section on the efficiency of techno-gadgets and a column on the efficiency of idleness.