I did a drawing of the Secondary School of Applied Arts and made it into a thank you card which we all signed for the two ladies that had looked after us all week.
21st October
On reflection, I did like how the image became more distorted as it transferred from between one sheet to the other and as they moved slightly in the breeze. This movement had occurred because I had not secured the bottom of the sheets and I liked the way it added to the ambiguity of the image.
I was also interested in how the edge of the circle kept moving around due to how the pieces of film had been edited together. I liked the idea of the editing process almost having a life of its own in determining how the finished film looked.
I thought about time again about what time is? Is it really just change? Is time just the feelings of change? Does time move through us, or do we move through time?
Walter Benjamin saw time in the past as a single event consisting of disaster heaped upon disaster. He used a drawing by Paul Klee “Angelus Novus” to demonstrate how he pictured the Angel of History, saying that the Angel wants to be able to undo all the carnage of the past but is forever being blown backwards into the future by a ferocious storm, a storm which Benjamin calls progress.
This analogy reflects for me the lack of control that we seem to have over the events that are happening all around us all of the time and how little control we have over how much the future is affected by the past. It is almost as if we are like the angel, stuck in the middle between of an ever growing history and an ever shrinking future.
In contrast, the philosopher, Henri Bergson thought that we were wrong to try to measure time in a mechanical, scientific way. He believed that we experienced time as duration and that we were a diverse entity that could only be measured by quality not quantity, with no discernible features and in a constant fluid state of flux. As he explains in Time and Free Will, to endure is to be a:
qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution which is yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities (Bergson cited in Watts Cunningham, 1914).
My installation in the prison made me explore the concept of time on a deeper level. I thought about how I had used something in the present time to create an unknown abstract form which in turn represented a time in the past but which also drew a parallel with how the future of the prison remained unknown.
This work made me think about the intrinsic relationship between time and history and how although time had moved on, the history surrounding the prison had not, even though one could not exist without the other?
With opinion divided on such an emotionally charged subject, no one can decide whether to knock the prison down or make it into a museum to commemorate the people who spent time there. Therefore the prison building itself remains stuck in both history and time.
Link to film Masquerade: https://vimeo.com/191950739
Reference:
Watts Cunningham, G. (1914), Bergson’s Conception of Duration, The Philosophical Review, 23(5),September, pp.525-539.
