Documenting Time and Thought Through Objects
Living with anxiety disorders is very difficult. It will make you want to grasp onto time and thoughts- things you can’t touch or see, and hold on to them as they are fleeting. It’s frustrating to have no tangible representation to these universally nonsensical ideas, this was the inspiration for these two projects.
I wanted to remap events and create an object where one could actually see a manifestation of time.
I drew a self portrait every day for several months on a piece of raw canvas, in hopes to create a scroll showing my mood, interests, and time commitment over the course of the project. I then harvested more data from the scroll by taking a video of the drawings and recording the resulting lumetri scope. This video serves as a representation of color over time. Lastly, I utilized the properties of the raw canvas to create an audio recording of time. As the different materials used for painting and drawing on the canvas bound the fibers in different ways, I scraped a steel scribe across the surface, recording the sound and processing an image from it. This image then represents sound over time and the physical audio is also sound over time.
I also wanted to create a physical space where nonsensical thoughts manifest themselves. Often times people with anxiety disorders experience racing thoughts and they can often seem very important, yet fleeting. I wanted to capture and idolize these thoughts in a long lasting archive, so I created four orihon style books. Orihon is an ancient east Asian style of book binding that utilizes Kozowashi paper and strong binding engineering.
I captured my racing thoughts through the Siri voice text feature on my phone as I walked to the bus every morning. As Siri understood my thoughts she wrote what she believed I was saying, and I had no choice but to understand my thoughts as she did. When thoughts are racing they usually don’t stick, and I don’t remember any of the converstations I had with myself to produce the thoughts that Siri recorded in my notes app. By juxtaposing the illigitmacy of these sayings I curated from my notes with the permanence of an orihon style book, I wanted to create an absurd object worthy of self-reflection.
