4 mini briefs

1. Slowing down time vs. Speeding up time
-ways of showing time in slow motion and in fast forward. go for extremes
-personal experiences of how different countries/nations perceive time: Hong Kong, London, Munich, Taipei
-possible medium: film?

“Clocks and watches are now far more accurate than we need them to be in our daily lives... Perhaps this need to be in possession of the exact time reflects some fault in our perception of the world, and a defect in our grasp of space-time. Obsessive attention to microscopic detail is usually a symptom of underlying neurosis. Confident people carry neither money nor watches, and expect the world to keep time with them.”
- JG Ballard

2. Einstein's Dreams
-designing 30 objects that can work as time measuring devices in these 30 different worlds

3. Time frames
-further exploring the use of photography as a medium for capturing time frames for different people
-disposable camera that can be rewound and reused
-find 2 people with different relationships:
eg. 2 people who are in the same career, family members living in different parts of the world,

4. Ways of physically capturing time
-further development of roses immersed in resin

24hrs

how much can you do in 24hours?
mapping a day where i recorded everything i did and the duration of each event:



i did this by creating a grid system that divides into 24 sections by which i can "fill in" with the events of the day:

roses are red, violets are blue..

have been trying to explore ways of bringing time to a standstill in our physical world. so as a starting point, i bought a bouquet of white roses and painted them in resin to record each stage of their growth.

mixed feelings about the outcome so far.. the resin took a while to dry out completely, which i suspect has caused the roses themselves to wilt faster than the resin could "freeze" them in time. so some of the roses do look more dead than they do alive.. which wasn't what i was hoping for!

i do think though this unexpected result isn't entirely disappointing. i suppose then it in a way shows how time that isnt captured fast enough just dies. very literally.


also i found the resin a bit too thickly painted on. i don't really like that kind of aesthetic quality it creates as it feels very artificial and also it's a bit to shiny for my liking. so taking these points on board, i've made a few alterations of my "freezing" process:


the roses will now be submerged in the vase of water as opposed to hung and dried in mid-air. perhaps then while the resin is drying on it, the flower can still breath and is alive. the resin coating is also thinner..

treasure each moment

recently I've experienced things that have changed me into a completely different person. my priorities list was unbalanced and I've neglected what should've mattered to me the most. it was only until a couple of days ago that I realized what has become of me and my life.. which sparked this whole idea of "treasure each moment". I still can't get over this quote by Tennessee Williams:

"Has it ever struck you…that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quickly you hardly catch it going"

it is in a way very sentimental, very melancholy. very sad that each moment that passes by is so fast that you simply cannot grasp it in your hands. it is out of your control and it is what makes time beautiful in a sense that one moment in time can never be lived twice.

it scares me that i'm changing topics now but it took a lot of courage to do so as well! now i can only hope that i'll be able to catch up with things and gain more insight into the direction that i want to be going with my final year project.

what i want to investigate now besides the theories behind time (circadian clock, biological clocks, the solar system etc..) is how to capture the essence of time. are we able to capture a moment in time? is there something more substantial, more thought-provoking than simply photographs?

list of things to do and places to go to:
-live a day without knowing the time.. this would require more preparation than the actual experiment! will have to cover all clocks around the house and find a way to remove the time off my phone..
-visit National Maritime Museum
-ways of "capturing time" in nature: perhaps buying a bouquet of flowers and recording their every stage of life by "freezing" them in resin?
-visit Kew Gardens
-look into Einstein's theories of time
-create my own mini time measuring devices

what is TIME..?

"Has it ever struck you... that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going?"
-Tennessee Williams

This quote has really got me thinking.. about Time.
What is Time? Something which we live by everyday... which our lives revolve around. Is Time merely a number? A date? An hour?

Time at present is a number. Yet Time in the past is a Memory.

Time is marked by Memories. Memories chart every stage of your life and lets us have a past.

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.”
-Jeremy Irons

We don't remember days or times... we remember moments in time.
What would be a way of capturing moments in time that is more than just numbers? More than just an hour on the clock, a date on the calendar?

"Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires."
-Charles Caleb Colton