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TIME AS TECHNIQUE

This whole website is based on time. It is a kind of diary, except not with words. Images function as thoughts. These thoughts happen to evolve, while being stuck in a timeline, they serve as a memory.

Often I think whether this website is useful only for myself or also for you. I feel like this guide excists as a bridge between you and me, also between word and image; but most of all between times.

I have always had this idealization of historic times. These go from yesterday until ancient history. I think this fascination is a human thing to have, I feel like we are obsessed with history and the stories it serves. I have this struggle between the importance of archiving and the unnatural urge of maintaining power over time. Often I feel like these two thoughts can’t live together; either you decide to archive and collect time and history or you decide to let go. But, the older I get, the more I feel like both could happen at the same time. I think digital archiving is great, you collect text and images for other people to read and look at in the future. I feel this urge, I have to archive. Though I think the physical objects captured within the archive, are free to exist and maybe dissapear.

I’ll give an example: this summer I was in the historical library of the university of Bologna. We were allowed to enter the building, but we could not touch any of the books. I understand these books are of great historical value, though I feel like it is an unnatural thing to keep these things away from the people. I guess these books were once made for people to read. Now, all of sudden, it becomes this historical treasure, which should be protected from the people. Almost like the intention of the object dissapears. I feel like the same thing happens to art, we protect historical works meticulously from air, humidity and even human breath. I think this again is the result of capitalist society, where everything is based on the monetary value of an object. Maybe these works and books were not made to last, maybe they were created in a specific time for a specific reason. It is a miracle these works still exist. We should be grateful for that, though I do not think it is our purpose to maintain all these things for further generations. We should touch them, smell them and use them.

For me, my digital time-based archiving helps me to let go of overvaluing works and objects. It is not my goal to sustain these works for decades, because I think their relevance will vanish. I want to give the work a kind of freedom, a freedom to experience the ravages of time, whatever that may bring. Of course, this is my point of view, I can’t decide this for other artists or makers in general.

On this page, you can see my first attempt at trying to capture my work and life in a time-based archive. This was done week by week, as I was trying to get a view on what I was doing at the time. I just moved to media art, I was trying to discover what this department meant to me. I think the idea of archiving became the work itself back then. It helped me to just create and combine these random pieces as if they were one work.