Grounded in 1996, Time’s Up undertakes applied research in the behavior of the public individual. From its basis in the harbor of Linz, Austria, where the offices and workshops are found, the group organizes situations that perturb the nature of a given everyday situation, allowing and encouraging altered and enhanced interactions between the public individuals that visit the situations. The choice of the term situation to describe the main field of endeavor relates to the completeness of the environments that are assembled. The spaces in which Time’s Up acts are spaces in which the visitor, acting in a public space and thus referred to as the public individual, finds environments that are intrinsically everyday yet subtly and distinctly perturbed. The process of removing the person from the realm of the everyday, in theatrical work known as the suspension of disbelief, and segueing them into these environments that are real yet unreal, allows the investigation of personal and interpersonal behaviour. The situations can be referred to as ‘real virtuality’ as the visitor is taken into the space physically, yet the dynamics of the space are removed from those of reality, they are somehow virtual.
