This Brooklyn Artist Is Living on Mars Time

If you’ve passed by the Open Source Gallery in South Slope, near the border with Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, anytime in the past month, you may have noticed the gallery looks less like a gallery than usual and more like a shabby-chic bedroom out of an Urban Outfitters catalog.

Linger a while longer, and you may notice a blonde woman, usually wearing black, somewhere inside the room — on her bed, at her desk with her typewriter, pacing her floors, staring up at her clocks.

The woman is Australian artist (and Brooklyn transplant) Sara Morawetz, 33, and she has been living on Mars time since July 15.

“A Mars day is around 24 earth hours and 40 earth minutes in length,” Morawetz said in a message sent to Patch, “which means every day my ‘day’ fell out of sync with Earth time by 40 minutes until it inverted and now (thankfully!) has almost returned to normal.”

Scientific American explains that Morawetz’ experiment will last just long enough “for her days to completely invert and then slowly return to normal, not unlike a full waxing and waning cycle of the moon.”

According to Scientific American, every organ in her body is likely in distress.

Wondering what that might feel like?

Prose posted to Morawetz’s Facebook page and official log book captures some of the turmoil, the disorientation, the weightlessness. A few excerpts:

• “I have been in another time — another place — somewhere in between Earth and Mars // awake and asleep... transitioning through thoughts — ideas — feelings in a real time that is entirely of my own creation.”
• “It’s day. It’s night. It’s something in-between. Does time even matter anymore?”
• “You move forward. You move back. You are propelled by measures you are no longer marking.”
• “Time drifts past dreamlessly and you feel suspended.”
• ”And as energy morphs into listlessness and your emotions ricochet, the inexorable march of the clock ticks on and on and on and on regardless.”
• “It is getting easier. I acknowledge that.... everything except sleeping.”
  

But Morawetz hasn’t been going crazy inside the gallery for the entire experiment. “I was allowed to go see friends, go shopping, etc.,” she told Patch. “I just had to do it according to Mars time.”

The hardest part of the project, she said, “was definitely when I was going to sleep before sunrise and I was waking up in twilight. It was this weird moment where I literally had no life. It felt really frightening.”

Her performance art piece was inspired in part by NASA scientists, who have been required to do the same thing — and in part by the possibility that the human race won’t always be on Earth time.

“We created these units to help govern this planet,” she said. ”But they could be changed, and they may need to change.”

Below is a livestream of Morawetz in her bedroom/gallery, where she’ll be living for two more days — until August 22 at 6 p.m., at which time Open Point Gallery will be holding a closing reception for her show. Michael Allison of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has provided the guiding science behind Morawetz’ project, will also be on hand to speak on the philosophy of time and space.