24th April 1905
In this chapter of Einstein’s Dreams time is separated into two categories, mechanical time and body time. Mechanical time, as you could imagine, is predetermined, what we would call “clock time.” wake up at 7, eat lunch at noon, and supper at 6. If you had to imagine this, it would be very metallic and structured. To represent the “mechanical time” in the collage I used all words and numbers that were different forms of telling time. I organized these numbers and words on the 5 x 8 sheet of paper in the form of a clock, having the centerface a number or word. Then I placed 12 numbers shooting out from the center word, as if it had 12 “hours.” Mechanical time is very structured so by putting the numbers in a more organized formation represents the structure.
Body time is more free flowing. Body time is is very unstructured, where you just allow your body to tell time. You don’t follow a clock. Where you wake up when you want, go to work once you wake up, you eat when you’re hungry. When I imagined this, I imagined very organic objects and materials. Very free flowing, or as some may say it, going with the flow. To represent this idea of very organic time, body time, I used very organic shapes that express a lot of movement and fluidity such as water, a smokey substance, and a leaf from a plant. I also used a drawing of a female’s body to also express body time. The picture of the woman seems very careless of what is going on around her as she looks as if she is just laying down and relaxing. The organic objects are wrapping around her and surrounding her as if the objects are a part of her, representing the way our bodies decide on time.
The final panel of the triptych is a mixture of mechanical time and body time, Intertwining both ideas of something very structured compared to something vey free flowing. To do so, I used some of the organic objects from the body time panel and mixed it with all sorts of clocks and watches and created this collage and mash up of the two and right in the center of it all is a set of words that reads “ Don’t let numbers define you.” I thought this went along with the idea of how you can use mechanical time and watches to tell you when to get places but don’t get so caught up in a perfect schedule, if you’re late you’re late but that does not define you as a person.
In this triptych some of the mapping techniques I came across while creating was color. In the all words and numbers panel I decided to keep it all black and white since the mechanical time element seems to be very straightforward and that there is only one right way to follow it. In the body time panel I used a lot more color because body time seems to have a lot more freedom. You can also see the thick and the thin, in the mechanical time panel you can see that it is very thin and just on the surface, not very much density whereas the body time panel has a lot more density and overlapping where it feels a lot thicker and the piece has a lot more dimension.
