CVU

Convenience as Unit and the PAX Configuration

I come from a highly infrastructured island society where convenience systems—logistical, administrative, and commercial—are deeply integrated into everyday life. In such environments, daily actions rarely involve waiting; tasks like paying taxes, sending packages, or accessing services are almost entirely frictionless. Over time, I began to observe how these systems quietly shape not just social behavior, but bodily rhythms, expectations, and dependencies. My artistic work stems from these observations. Rather than critique convenience itself, I develop methods to sense its presence, transformation, and absence. I call this experimental framework the Convenience Unit (CVU) system—a dual-layered method designed to record how infrastructural rhythms affect perception, decision-making, and improvisation under varying degrees of system availability. The upcoming residency in Svalbard will mark the first field application of this method in an environment where convenience is minimal and delay is normalized. This is not a cultural contrast exercise. It is a rhythmic experiment: How do humans reorganize their timing, actions, and mutual dependencies when systems no longer respond instantly? What new forms of orientation emerge when convenience is no longer the default?

System Configuration: CVU–PAX

The CVU–PAX is a three-module wearable system designed to assess how convenience operates—or fails—in various infrastructural settings. The system can switch between three active sensing modes: PAX–M1: Density Meter — Evaluates environmental and service saturation. PAX–PROBE: Rhythmic Trace Recorder — Captures movement patterns and delay traces across terrain and daily rhythms. PAX–CORE: Responsiveness Feedback Engine — Detects how systems react (or fail to react) to user presence and demand. Originally built for ultra-convenient East Asian cities, CVU–PAX has been deployed in delayed or decentralized geographies to misalign with dominant rhythms—revealing how humans recalibrate their actions in the face of system latency.

Planned Field Experiments

Testing Layer 1 in a low-system environment: quantifying slowness, gaps, and spatial rhythm distortions. Deploying Layer 2 through wearable sensors and delay feedback modules to document perceptual adjustments. Prototyping a pop-up “Inconvenience Store”: an experimental space where delay, negotiation, and shared labor replace automated response. This phase of the project reframes inconvenience not as a hindrance but as a medium for observing how humans reattune to institutional latency and ecological pacing. What if friction is not failure, but a signal? What can a slowed-down system teach us about how to reorienting trust, timing, and imagination?

Theoretical References The IRM module is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, which frames space and time as social rhythms; Brian Larkin’s concept of infrastructural aesthetics, highlighting how systems shape perception and affect; and Bruno Latour’s idea of techno-institutional assemblages, where every metric is also a trace of power and negotiation. These frameworks support CVU’s use of measurement as a way to sense friction, latency, and infrastructural imagination.

System Specification: CVU–IRM (Layer 1)

System Specification: CVU–PFL (Layer 2)

System Specification:
CVU–Synthesis: Toward a Unit of Convenience(Layer 3)

The third layer of the CVU system consolidates insights from both metrics (Layer 1) and frictional perception (Layer 2) to prototype a speculative unit of measurement—1 CVU (Convenience Unit). Rather than define convenience solely by speed, access, or digital responsiveness, the CVU reflects a combined value that accounts for emotional strain, rhythm misalignment, and the cost of improvisation.

Formula Concept:

CVU = [IRM weighted average] – [Friction Impact Coefficient (FIC)]

Where: IRM is the base score from the five infrastructural indicators (Layer1) FIC is a modifier derived from the density and severity of frictional entries logged in Layer 2 (e.g., EM/BD/IC ratios over time)

Each CVU reading is localized and time-sensitive, acknowledging that convenience is never absolute—it fluctuates across bodies, climates, and infrastructures.

Goal: To create a vocabulary and measurement tool that recognizes the complexity of convenience—not as a promise of modernity, but as a rhythm of coexistence between systems and users.

Why This Matters: Beyond Measurement

Convenience has long been seen as a technological triumph—a sign of progress, speed, and optimization. Yet today, global societies are increasingly confronted with the costs of this logic: fractured attention, ecological exhaustion, and political inertia masked as efficiency.

By proposing a unit of convenience, this project does not seek to universalize a standard, but to destabilize one. CVU is not a tool for control, but a sensor for dissonance.

It reveals where systems begin to fail—not catastrophically, but quietly—through everyday hesitations, frustrations, and delays. It invites us to rethink failure not as breakdown, but as feedback. In this sense, inconvenience is not a design flaw, but a social temperature—an atmospheric reading of how bodies and infrastructures fall out of sync.

Looking ahead, the CVU system may serve:

>Artists mapping friction across climate zones

>Planners rethinking rhythm in mobility infrastructures

>Communities co-designing post-convenience public services

>Researchers reframing accessibility beyond ableist logics of speed and seamlessness

Convenience is not neutral. By turning it into a measurable unit, we begin to ask who defines ease, who absorbs delay, and what futures are left out when systems run too smoothly.

Future

1. Artistic Translation The friction data and perceptual recordings will inform a new Convenience Unit series—spanning video, installation, and documentary formats—that visualizes the invisible costs of convenience.

2. Open-Source Tools A modular version of the CVU system will be developed for use by other artists, designers, and researchers. Through open protocols and shared datasets, CVU aims to become a platform for collaborative sensing and rhythmic comparison across climates, cultures, and infrastructures.

CVU will evolve from an individual experiment to a collective method—an open sensor for shared dissonance.

CVU