Tag Archives: time

4D Foundation Project 4 – Research

 

The first video is a documentation of a woman spending time alone in a context of 5 consecutive days. Each day, she challenged herself into spending time alone doing activities that are normally accompanied by others. Such activities include watching a scary movie alone, going to a erotic museum alone, and dinning alone in a cafe. All these places that are usually accompanied by friends and family now become a lonely place to her. Overwhelmed by the strangers around her, she began feeling self-conscious about being alone, with no one to talk to or to share her experiences with. However as time goes by, she began to understand herself better.  Despite being confined within time, it allowed her to pay more attention to herself. Food tasted better when she was alone; she was able to expand and widened her taste buds. She gets to know and understand herself better; where she is able to love herself more inside out. 

 

 

Video below from 3:05 onwards talks about Hsieh’s outdoor piece. 

Hsieh is an artist whose medium of expression is not words or sounds or paint, but his own life. For this second piece of work known informally as the Outdoor Piece, he plan to do a one year performance piece from September 26, 1981, to September 26, 1982, where he promise to live and stay outdoors for a year, and never go inside. He will not enter into any building, subway, train, car, airplane ship, cave, or tent. With that he will have a sleeping bag with him at all times. He live a lot the streets and doorsteps of manhattan. Here, Hsieh demonstrate how art becomes life through passing time. His work raises difficult questions about life and art and being, and about what it means to live in the world we live in. He relied on pay phones and chance meetings to keep in touch with his friends. Each day, he recorded his wanderings on a map, noting in particular the places where he ate and slept. 

This performance can be viewed as a space where he opened himself up, as fully as possible, to the outside. As time pass, the self can perish from exposure, as well as from confinement. Here, became a nomad. As time continue day by day, he tested his powers of survival in circumstances that were more than usually beyond his own control. 

Both pieces are presented through circular time where it talks about a repeating process, that creates continuous and infinite outcomes. However in the first piece, the host creates planned events and activities that triggers her emotions in the cause of time, while the artist in the second video let everything flow naturally in time; allowing whatever unpredicted situations happens at its own time. 

We can divide time up in different ways, and have different beliefs about how time affects us. We tend to think of time in terms of a three-part structure of past, present, and future, with time moving in one direction without repetition. Though events can repeat themselves, tomorrow is fundamentally different and separate from yesterday. However, I felt that these conceptualisations can also change over time. Who knows maybe in the future, there may be more than one way of looking at time.