Expanding Time
I decided to record moments of my day that were in motion combined with one or two that were still. I found it interesting that moving and static things are connected through the flow of their process. Development and past movements are reflected in the present. The image that shook me the most was the pile of trash collected in one day at the Harvard Yard. All of it was trash that could be recycled! I was mesmerized by the gesture, which aimed to create awareness about how our earth is getting more polluted, the amounts of trash we get rid off daily, and how recycling and changing our habits can impact our environment profoundly. I stayed there for about 15 min observing the reactions of people, almost everyone took a look and seemed to be curious. I asked myself, how can I find a way of interpreting my understanding of this subject in terms of time expanding and condensing time? To my understanding, the piles of trash are a representation of the amount of time that every single piece of trash was opened and discarded, basically how long each item had traveled from its fabrication to its end. To think of this is to think of time expanding. And then, the time it took to collect the piles of trash, to set them up, and the people that were part of this process constitutes a time condensing experience.
Myself going around the piles and progressively creating a distance from it represents the motion it initially had, a beginning and an end. The other two shots that I picked for opening and closing the video were like mirrors to show the motion of time through the things that were naturally moving. They were still shots but within them, nature was naturally moving. I was always focused on catching a moment where my position wasn’t in motion although what my eyes were seeing was. If we look more closely, we can find examples of time condensing and expanding because everything has a process, a start, and an end.