The ninth annual International Space-Out Competition was held last week in Hong Kong—a grueling contest of grit and wit in which contestants go head-to-head to see who can chill the fuck out more.
Yes, really. You just have to daydream. If you give into the attention-grabbing demands of the modern world, you lose. Each round lasts for 90 minutes, and you are eliminated:
When players check out their phones
When players fall a sleep and laugh
When players chitchat
When players sing a song and dance
When players drink a beverage which is not served by operators
More of the intense sport rules, courtesy of South China Morning Post:
To win requires maintaining a steady low heart rate, measured every 15 minutes, and attracting enough spectators' votes. They pick a favourite based on the contestant's reasons for taking part and on their spacing out "performance". The prize is a free flight to South Korea, where the competition started in 2014.
The competition was created in 2014 by a South Korean artist named Woopsyang, as a sort of performance-installation-art-piece commentary on hurried modern culture. As the artist explained in a separate South China Morning Post article:
It is something of a paradox that people compete to effectively win at "doing nothing" when the goal is to give themselves a break. The artist says this ironic framing is deliberate, to help people see the value in getting better at doing nothing.
"We tend to think that doing nothing is a waste of time," Woopsyang says. "But in reality, for modern people, such 'unproductive' time doing nothing is actually absolutely necessary."
I could use my own competition sooner than later.
Previously:
• The right way to daydream
