Category Archives: Time: Embodied

Body as Trace

Posted on by under Time: Embodied
Body as Trace
Humans leave traces of themselves everywhere and we have been doing this
from the beginning of time. Even the caveman’s simple tools made out of rocks can
be considered traces – extensions of themselves. In today’s technological age, I was
thinking about how everyone spends so much of the day online. We now not only
leave physical traces of ourselves, but digital traces of ourselves as well. It is so easy
to go back in your phone to find an old message or to go back into your browsing
history to find a website you were on earlier that day. Potentially, you could sit
down at an unknown laptop and you could learn a lot about a person by looking at
the traces they leave on their Internet history. Indeed, a person’s browsing history
can share too much – secrets. In contrast, people clear their browsing history to hide
their secrets from people that they do know. I wanted to show this through the
contrasting voices and visual screenshots. Paired with the dusted latent fingerprints,
I aimed to convey how these are secrets that people do not know about individuals
because they are deliberately hiding them. These secrets are invisible, but they leave
evidence physically, although not immediately visible. The immediately visible trace
of the browser history can also be deleted, and once again the secret is invisible.
Video Link: OliviaSwinford

Body as Witness

Posted on by under First Year, Time: Embodied

For this piece, I was inspired by how our clothing is a witness to our lives; over time, they become stained, ripped and worn out. It lives our daily lives with us  and through our actions and interactions, we affect the clothing. In the same fashion, our hearts are witnesses to our lives. We are born with a perfectly good heart that has not been broken or torn or stained. We go through life and we meet people. We let them into our lives starting on a surface level, public, relationship, and, as time progresses the relationship becomes more personal and private. They affect our lives and the people we let in change our hearts. They are not the same as they were before. People come into our lives and stain our hearts with their love and our memories and it leaves a rip when they leave. I wanted to show this through a simple garment as a metaphor for our hearts. I constructed a simple dress and then I took a series of photos in different locations. The locations progress from public to private areas, just as our relationships do. As time goes by, the dress becomes more worn out, stained and ripped in a natural sense because the process of letting someone in and then realizing you have changed is a slow process and one that you are not necessarily fully aware of. It isn’t until they are gone that you fully see the change they had on you. I displayed these photos in a family photo album, just as memories are stored in photo albums because that is mainly what you are left with in the end and a family photo album is a common symbol that most everyone can relate to, just as everyone faces this similar experience in their lives.

 

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Perceiving and Mapping Time: Waking Up

Posted on by under First Year, Time: Embodied

After doing my written observation and analysis of the process of waking up, I could not stop thinking about that first instant I am awoken by my alarm and jerked out of the dream or peaceful sleep that I was in. As you lay there, the dream and place you were once in begins to fade at a rapid speed and a few seconds later you can barely remember what happened in it, and you only have a haze of where your mind just was as your eyes readjust to the light and the room around you. This all happens in such a small amount of time, yet it is a lot for you to visually process. After reading Speed: Aberrations of Time and Movement by Oliver Sacks, I was struck by this small time span once again. Sacks states, “Dreams can take wing, move freely and swiftly, precisely because the activity of the cerebral cortex is not constrained by external perception or reality.” When we are dreaming, our minds can churn out stories and thoughts in a matter of milliseconds, whereas while we are awake, our perception of time slows down significantly. This was all my inspiration behind my project. I wanted to capture how through the eye, in that time span, your dreams become smaller and harder to see while your surroundings become more apparent as time becomes slower and larger.

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