Chronoception
The Window is A PolyClock
TL; DR: the subjective experience of time
The Window project has ended up being a polyclock, simultaneously tracking multiple types of time. It has captured milliseconds to millennium, from a suspended leap to a once-in-a-hundred year event (a global pandemic)…
…to a rare positioning of planets in the sky signalling the end of a 2000-year Age (Pisces to Aquarius)…
… to an ambulance caught blasting past a construction worker laboring for hours.
The project tracks — tracked — the passing of just over one year (and started partially into the 3 week/3 year vague plague, with the end of the photo series being a “demolition eviction” from the Window’s location, a hard out which was as unvague as a descending guillotine). Details captured in the backgrounds of the photos measure the changes in the seasons (leaves turning, snow falling, skirts shortening), and architectural shifts in the surroundings (houses torn down, roads ripped up, condos constructed — note the cranes that do cameos in three of this post’s pics). The images also clock global and local events — a protest for the war in Ukraine, a protest for a hotel entrance for the Korean restaurant across the street. They also count-off momentous moments in people’s lives (a pregnant woman, months later, photographed pushing her newborn in a baby carriage).
The Window chronicled a few seconds of each subject’s life, roughly the time it took (takes?) to travel the small field of view of the street below. Sometimes the shots caught even more ephemeral events, like the split second of a skateboard trick.
The photographs were taken from a single location, at all hours of the day and night, every day of the week. (A future exhibition might display them in accurate chronological order). The images are, of course, only viewed after the action occurs, pictorial fossils that reveal historical moments — history not just belonging to ‘great events’ or citizens, but to all, even, or especially everyday people, like the man photographed dozens of times over that year+ at sunset, regular like clockwork, a crosswalk Sisyphus forever walking, or the U-Haul vans always hauling, all hours of the day.
One’s perception of time changes over time. An extra year to a one year old is 100% of their life, but to an eighty year old, only 1.25%. Thinking of it the reverse way, if a lightning flash to an 80 year old is 0.2 seconds, then to a one-year-old it would seem like 16 seconds. Imagine that: a terrible, blinding line of light ripping across the sky, pulsing and crackling… one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two… … … one-thousand-sixteen…
Even within one photo different times are captured. A full lunar eclipse happens only once every 17 years or so. And… light from the moon takes 1.3 seconds to reach Earth, light from the Sun takes 8 minutes, and light from some stars takes millions of years to tickle the rods and cones in our retinas … so looking up to the sky, you’re looking into multiple pasts.
Now is never now. This substack, and The Window photos, are being read or seen at various times in the future; my “now”, at time of writing, is the reader’s past. Some of the project’s images hint at the, or a, fascinating future (showing augmented realities, self-driving robots, use of AI, phone prosthetics, personal satellites…) which might just be the humdrum now of a future reader, or even their distant past — “Cars, how quaint!”. The Window is (was, will be) a palimpsest of nows.
Atomic-clock experiments have shown that time passes faster at the top of a mountain (less gravity) than it does at sea level. This means that that person up there, in that tiny jet, is is aging faster than you, down here deeper in the gravity well. I guess then that this also means our heads are older than our feet. So we too are each composites of time.
NOTES:
Duration in seconds / event / frequency occurring during The Window:
0.15s / ambulance passing behind city worker / 1
0.20s / visible lighting trail / 2
0.35s / people caught suspended in air / 4
1.0s / skateboard trick / 3
1.5s / bird fluttering at window / 2
4.0s / motorbike wheelie / 1
480s / altercation ending with man throwing chair at store window / 1
1200s / rainbow / 3
7200s / eclipse / 1
14400s / fire in apartment across the street / 1
47336400s / pandemic / 1
36000000s / hours documenting street below / 2500
820497600s / time lived at the window location / 1
63115200000s / age of aquarius / 1
∞s /intimations of infinity / ∞
RELATED POSTS:
-”Chronoception”, above is the X-axis (time). “Verticality”, below, is the Y-axis post; How Far the Man lets you see individual images of the man over time:
Verticality
how far the man
Four “sets” from The Window: Crosswalk / Happiness is Motion / Battle-Ballet / Gravity, Antigravity… (More: nu4ya.com)
K.I.A. (painting, sculpture, installation): www.nu4ya.com