Blog
Dear all, welcome to the seminar’s Blog!
This blog will function as a virtual shared space providing a less formal way of communication and exchange throughout this online semester.
Feel free to pose and answer questions, share links, thoughts, sketches and other materials – related to our topics of course 🙂
Looking forward to reading/seeing/listening/watching your posts.
Best,
Netta
This gif is the result of an overlap of 352 photos taken during the Winter break with my phone. The text is from a cathartic typing.
I was going to do a gif of all of the photos, but my machine could not handle the weight of the files. Appropriate. Photoshop was crashing repeatedly. Suitable. So, I applied a bleding mode to all the 352 layers and saved 13 png files with different opacities. Small doses. This is what this gif is made out of.
I find it interesting that the overlapping of my photos ended up with a cross in the middle, like a window frame. I was obviously at home most of the time. The burning aspect of this overlap is also an expression of the events of my Winter break. What I thought was going to be a self care + artistic time in the home atelier, with enough time to do all of what I didn’t do during the semester, ended up as a stress somatization on my neck due to many unfortunate covid-related events and to my workaholic coping mechanism (focusing on my business, of course, not on my studies).
– Paulina Hupe
To care means vicinity, vicinity is closely related to touch, and touch has become something to avoid if possible. In times of a global pandemic the calls for solidarity are ubiquitous with seemingly no feasible approach to sustain it. The care of infected and elderly was outsourced to “professionals” and care workers and the micro care structures are vanishing by the day.
Care work is ephemeral for two reasons: on the one hand caring is affection and brief interactions. For this it is in its nature immaterial and almost impossible to document as caring means providing comfort, help and well-being to each other in the moment. On the other hand caring is suffering from being neglected by governmental agency, economic approval and general attention. The latter makes care work rarely considered to be work.
For this reason I decided to capture some moments of care to shed some light on very slight and overlooked actions by people with which I spend my holidays. Thank you for caring about me.
The archive consists of two documents to be looked at together or individually. One is a set of explanations of how to care whereas the other one is visual documentation of those mundane (inter)actions.
Every time the year comes to its end I feel the need to walk around the city for hours. The object of my fascination is the darkness – that of late December that engulfs all things, all people, houses, cars and trees. The windows suddenly emerge straight from the night, thus subtly indicating the existence of houses that stay hidden. It seems to me as if there were always more people in the city in winter.
This series of photographs is a kind of attempt to capture the December gloom (which is, however, almost impossible in photography as it captures light), capture the elusive. Do not be fooled by the light that is visible on them at first glance, it is just a catalyst for seeing its opposite. Sometimes nothing appears on the display at all and still every color value stands out on a black background.
Looking at these images can also be a revelation of what they hide. And even if nothing is left of my photos, the end of the year will come and my desire to walk will emerge again…
Michaela
An interactive artwork, visualising the seemingly endless loop of unchanging events, impressions, thoughts, feelings, activities…, which I found myself stuck in during the holidays.
Johannes Schmoll
During the holiday, most of my days were spent in my room. Sometimes, the fall of leaves from my plant broke the silence in the room. This made me started to notice the ongoing changes happening inside my room. Thus, I have the idea to record the organic subtle changes happening in my room. My plant and my body as the only visible organic objects inside the room, I recorded the growth of the hair from my eyebrow and the falling of the leaves from my plant. Obviously, the speed of the falling is faster than speed of growing. There are different life cycles and thus different representation of time within the same timeframe – the winter break.
I also recorded the view outside window because it is always so enjoyable to look at the tiny human beings moving and changes in the sky.
Tam Suet Wa
10 Apparitions is a collection of contemporaneous excerpts from 10 audio recordings and 7 dream records. 3 dream records are missing.
12am <-> 7am
24.12 25.12 27.12 28.12 30.12 31.12 01.01 04.01 05.01. 06.01
2020-2021
Berlin
Francisco Petrucci
Go To This Insta Page For Visiting My Project:
https://www.instagram.com/notes_archive_2021/
by xiaoer liu
This past winter break, I associated the archive, and especially the ephemeral aspect of it, to my train ride to visit family in Bodensee. As a girl coming from Israel, snow is probably the one thing I’ll always be fascinated to see in real life.
As the train was getting further and further from Berlin, the view became whiter and whiter. The endless desperate attempts to take the perfect picture of the fresh snow appear below. None of them do any justice to the actual beauty.
Every few days, like any other person who has reached the full capacity of their iCloud storage, I like to look back at my photo gallery and delete unwanted/unsuccessful images. As I saw what a failure it was to capture the view from the train, I thought to myself- if one would have access to all the deleted pictures that were ever taken all over the world, the ones that were „almost“ the perfect shot, but not quite- it would be nice to see them all one next to each other. Especially “missed” pictures of nature and pastoral portraits. How would this „missing“ feeling effect the viewer? We are used to see only the final product, after contemplating, debating, filtering and editing. Rarely do we ever get to see the raw “failure” of an attempt.
-Noga Shaham
The paths followed over a period of time become blurred as the days go by until they are forgotten. To walk is to inhabit spaces, spaces that are lost in time and in our memories until they generate a stain that is impossible to decipher. We also usually create paths with a goal and we forget about the process, the path itself. A path can be created by walking, but also by driving or flying. During my stay in Spain I have followed paths, created spaces, and inhabited them. Recording all these movements on paper allows me to record my actions every day, so that once time has passed I can look at the paper and remember, and nothing is forgotten. It is not a faithful representation of reality, nor a plan, it is a conceptual map of how my head remembers all my movements.
In the same way that paths and spaces are created by walking, driving, flying… our small movements also create these paths and spaces. The movement of a hand when writing shows us communication, paths, spaces; that normally die and disappear. Many times the processes of creation also die in pursuit of the final result, of the piece itself. This piece shows the process of writing a prose poem. The poem itself is no longer the protagonist, it is not important to read it but the interest lies in seeing how it has been written. Can this process also be considered as a piece in itself?
by Emma
archivingtheephemeral.wordpress.com 