KAIROI is a time-sensitive vending machine that asks people to give their time instead of money as an input; one has to stand placing their finger on a sensor, and ‘spend’ time to get a snack/ product. Three machines were installed at Max Mueller Bhavan- New Delhi and Kolkata (India)(2019) and Watermans Art Centre (2023) where they accumulated 24 days, 7 hours and 1 minute of time from the users/ ‘consumers’. This duration was then put for auction on a website and this time was to be attained by bidding through non-monetary bids as acts/ happenings. People bid to occupy a selected duration with ideas, like ‘I will crazily dance behind closed doors’ / ‘read time backwards’ / ‘I will zentangle’, and whichever bid got the highest votes, won that duration of time which resulted in the winner performing their bid/ task.

With disproportionate and biased capitalist expansion, leading to feelings of isolation, we witness a drastic temporal-spatial shrinkage, where time has been commodified as a currency to be saved – precious, limited – in a society driven by newfound strategies of accumulation and monetization of time. Temporal shrinkage occurs in conjunction with spatial shrinkage, as spaces are designed to make consumption more compact, quick and accessible, as in supermarkets, malls, work from home jobs, e-commerce, and here, a vending machine. The products are mainly eatables that, rather than just being consumables, signify a moment in time, arousing feelings of nostalgia, homesickness and attachment.