Week 2

Workshop with Tim 

This week Tim presented to us an introduction to the theme of time. He started the session by showing us some clips related to time and music and how important time is in music. The rhythm and the beat. And then we were just talking about what time is for us. 

For me time is running, there aren’t enough hours during the day. There is always something that has to be done, somewhere where I have to be. Always late, always running, and always have something on my mind. I’m always doing something yet I still end up doing things at the last minute. 

It’s stressful so sometimes I just have to slow down and just relax but even when I’m trying to do that there is still something on my mind. 

And another scary thing about time is how fast it’s passing. I’m scared of that, of all of these changes. I’m scared of getting old. 

One minute challenge

Tim organized this exercise where we each pulled one piece of paper with an idiom related to time on it. we had one minute to draw or write whatever came to our mind. I liked that, it made me think fast yet not overthink. This challenge had some interesting results from everyone in our group. 

In the next exercise, we were in pairs and we were supposed to create a hypothetical project related to one of the idioms. Pola and I chose time out of mind- a time in the past that was so long ago that people have no knowledge or memory of it.

With that idea, we did some research and came up with an idea related to the Big Bang Theory. 

Big Bang Theory says the universe as we know started with an infinitely hot and dense single point that inflated and stretched — first at unimaginable speeds, and then at a more measurable rate — over the next 13.7 billion years to the still-expanding cosmos that we know today.

This theory is so unbelievable just like a whole galactic universe. There are so many things about it that we don’t have any knowledge about that it is out of our mind. 

So to represent that we would create heads floating in a room and a big light shining from them. To represent the time out of mind. The heads would light up one by one to create a whole universe- just like the basics of the Big Bang Theory. 

Honestly, me and Pola were both so amazed by this idea that we started to think if we should make this as our final project. But after talking through that, unfortunately, we don’t have any budget for our projects and this one would be expensive so we can’t afford to do that for now. 

What is time? 

During this week I started to think about time and what it is. Basically, it’s everything and that’s why it’s so hard to find an appropriate description for it. Everything has its timeline, that sometimes collides. Every creature starts its timeline from birth and ends it with death. But the memories stay there in others’ minds. Time is human history, the history universe. Time is every second, minute, hour, day, month, and years that pass by. Time is the rising of the sun. Time is everything. 

So while thinking about it I found so descriptions describing time which I like.

Time is a measure of non-stop, consistent change in our surroundings, usually from a specific viewpoint. While the concept of time is self-evident and intuitive – the steady passing of events before our eyes; the orbit of the Moon around our planet – describing its fundamental nature is much harder.

Physicists define time as the progression of events from the past to the present into the future. If a system is unchanging, it is timeless. Time can be considered to be the fourth dimension of reality, used to describe events in three-dimensional space.

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. According to Rovelli, time emerges in the thermodynamic context, but it is an illusion born of our incomplete knowledge; it is not something that exists objectively. “Time is a derived concept, it is not something fundamental”.

Artist research

Ice Watch -Olafur Eliasson

Artist Olafur Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing have installed Ice Watch, a group of twenty-four blocks of ice, in front of Tate Modern.  With this project artist hoped many more people will understand the reality of climate change by experiencing Ice Watch. Although we may have seen photographs of the melting ice caps, we rarely have a physical experience of these conditions. By bringing the ice to London, the audience was able to engage with the ice directly.

Still Life -Sam Taylor-Wood

In Taylor-Johnson’s time-based work, a tray of beautiful fruit decomposes until nothing is left but a formless grey mass. The cheap plastic pen on the table, however, remains unchanged, quietly raising the environmental question of what will be left behind after we are gone. In this work she portrayed the process of time and effects of it. The mould on fruits is slowly multiplying while at the same time the pen is not changing its form at all.

Melting Men Nele Azevedo

In 2009 Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo carved 1,000 Melting Men out of ice and placed them on a stairway in a Square of Berlin in order to bring awareness to Global Warming. She created the installation to visually remind people of the melting ice caps in Greenland and Antartica

Through my research, I chose these artists’ works because they are portraying the influence of time. Time on its own is something that is hard to see, yet the passing of time on different objects is something doable. I think with my project I would like to discover a similar topic and capture time and its influence.

Exhibition

During this weekend Pola and I had an exhibition of our photos in Gwesty Cymru. The exhibition went nicely and I’m so happy we did it. I’m so grateful that Isaac organised that for us. But at the same time it was a lot of work so for the past two weeks I was focused on it. It was nice to have a chance to exhibit my work from my photography module since I can’t take part in the graduation show. I’m also happy with the feedback I received and the interesting conversations during this event. It was a lot of work and stress but it was worth it. Something that I have to work on is artist talk, I don’t think it was bad but it was very stressful for me.