[-empyre-] Time-Archiving

Sat May 29 03:42:57 AEST 2021

Hello everyone,

First I want to thank Renate and Patrick to include me in the discussion, I
am amazed going through the archive slowly.

Most of my practice has been illustration, design, collaborative new media
and intercultural art and research, and recently I am doing more practice
on digital art and interdisciplinary art projects.

Regarding the theme flow, That I enjoyed reading brilliant ideas here, I am
going to talk about a project I am currently working on.

It is an abstract diary project, called “cartography of moment”,
moment-graphy, and another name “notes in music” that Roz Dimon suggested.

I am recording a piece of time of every day into a hypothetical
coding/symbolic language.

The idea is to capture a short time (about an hour) and archive it in a
visual form, as an abstract story book of a daily life to be delivered to a
later time.

The discipline of the project is that, I focus on a subject, a passing
feeling, something that inspires me at the moment and engages me, either
emotionally, physically or mentally, and while I'm totally focused on it, I
draw on a page of the plaid notebook and fill its squares with different
symbols, colors, and codes that come to my mind as I feel the presence time.

I let my unconscious take part in the process and try not to intellectually
engage with the choices I make. Either aesthetically, or for the
composition and color palette.

I try not to plan or think ahead and, I just let it happen at the moment,
as it comes naturally as a visual translation of how I feel about the whole
idea of presence in the moment. Let it to be a direct note from the moment
I experience.

Now that I have done more than 100 pages in the past 6 months, I can
observe a pattern in my visual memos. I can see how my mind tends to choose
codes of the moment; forms and colors to express herself, and how my hand
tends to draw in similar space.

It's interesting how all these similar patterns and limited colors and
shapes could be so unique in their own way; and how different the concept
could be as a whole, compared to the details. How they relate and influence
each other and could change the meaning of each other.

I want to know if it is possible to capture the time we experience, those
moments that we are aware of our existence; I want to know if we could take
our feelings' selfies, and if we could be able to read them later too,
directly, from subconscious, and if all the process could make us be more
aware of our passing time. Like a selfie diary.

I was actually always obsessed with selfie photos and believed they are one
of the best time-capture memos materials, if taken honestly; because I
believe nothing can reflect our being better than our facial expression and
condition; and nothing could tell more about us than a face; the eyes, the
look in them, how much the person cares about himself, and when it is our
own face, what we remember of that specific time and space that has been
captured in that frame, and how much we remember of what we were going
through at the time, emotionally, even when we don't remember the story.

Moreover, A selfie represents only a glance in a second of someone's life,
but it can represent a period of time in the concept of a face itself. And
all the selfies through time together, would make another bigger collection
that can picture a more inclusive concept of that life and make a
meaningful story.

So, every moment could be a detail, representing a pixel, that helps to
shape the bigger picture. It can be dark or light, but doesn't matter as
long as it has a meaningful place and role in the whole concept.

Now that's a question: When we talk about the flow, are we actually talking
about those details, those individual pixels, frozen in a second, or we are
talking about the quality of the passing details, shaping a whole concept
as time experience, like the water passing in a river? Are we talking about
the river or the water?

Another question is that, what if we could take a selfie of every moment?
Could we communicate its quality with others? How much we could understand
those abstract language of others' subconscious, talking about their time
experiences, that is the only thing we ever know as living.

And isn't it all about art, anyway? That connection, that struggle to
understand another being, in a coded language that only our mind would
understand with an immediate abstract knowledge and we struggle to define
with human languages?

On the other hand, as Heraclitus theory, says “We look and do not look at
the same river; We are, and we are not.” It might be a philosophical
theory, but even scientifically, we know that every moment we live, our
body and mind are slightly different than before, Every moment, our body
organs are a moment older, our cells are in another phase of their lives,
each atom is in a slightly different place, moving around, in a different
pattern, that is so tiny that only could be observed in digital
microscopes, but it is happening. So actually every moment we are in a
slightly different quality of our existence.

In the end, this project started with me trying to make a personal visual
code language for music pieces and compare them together; Also a project
Patrick Lichty was doing with daily Asemic calligraphy to collect the
unconscious mind's patterns, inspired me to think of capturing the life
moments, the experienced time and feelings.

So, metaphorically, if every moment of life is a music note, we are the
composer of every day music. We are the only ones who could hear our own
music too. If we consider every thought we have during the day, as a code
and symbol we actually add to our existence time, we would realize how
important it is what we think of, or feel for in a daily basis; what we see
or listen or experience.

So, this project also led me to an Art therapy idea, that capturing time as
a passing quality -that we usually hardly notice in the speed of everyday
life- would help people to notice all those pixels that the big picture is
being made of; all those notes that make the music, and maybe lead them to
realize that, for making a better picture, and a more beautiful music, we
need to take care of those little details we spend our moments on.

I hope my writing does not differ so much from academic discipline, and if
it is, I apologize;

I am more of an artist with ideas and thoughts and I am still learning
academic English, the language I've started in my adult life.

I am really looking forward to hearing your thoughts, critiques,
suggestions, and comments on my project, if anyone has done anything
similar to it, if anyone is involved in art therapy or visual music I would
love to share ideas.

Negin Ehtesabian
neginete1 at gmail.com
negin.ehtesabian at gmail.com
neginete.com

Instagram pages:
Art <https://www.instagram.com/neginete.art/>
illustration <https://www.instagram.com/neginete.illustration/>
design <https://www.instagram.com/neginete.design/>
*Personal <https://www.instagram.com/neginete.art/>*
SaNg Art projects <https://www.instagram.com/sangartprojects/>
NPT projects <https://www.instagram.com/nptprojects/>
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