theories

The day starts with the rays of sun coming in through the window glass. The day ends by the darkness of night. Without the Earth rotating, days would not pass. Without the Earth rotating, stations would not pass. Time is subtended to the experience of our senses. Time is embodied within our environment. Without our senses communicating with external stimuli (Merleau-Ponty & Smith, 2018:246), only darkness would prevail. The world would metamorphose on a black smudge where, without bodies or spaces, no time would not go on. A black smudge existing inside another black smudge, simultaneously existing within an ever expanding black smudge in the middle of an infinite nothingness. Time is embodied because of its relationship with other bodies and spaces and our cognitive processes. Time plays an essential role in our personal livelihoods. It subtracts from memory and abstract from imagination. Time happens both, in the external world, and within internal cognitive processes. Thus time remains as a mechanism of embodied cognition (Manson, 2019:128).

The way to measure time, nonetheless remains material or physical. As Pangaea contortions, time passes and scars the lithosphere. As a glacier slowly moves down a hill, it shapes its path, deforming its path to a U-shaped valley. And a painter’s time is measured by the strokes of paint in his/her canvas.

Art is an embodied experience where time can be experienced, as an object that deforms, distorts or allows one to perceive time passing by, like a loaf of bread slowly molding. Or a piece of ice slowly defrosting whilst leaving the trace of its leak.

It seems like time is one-directional flowing from the past to the future and is fairly given to everyone/everything in this world. However, time is actually considered as spacetime -always be involved with space- and if we say a certain point of time, it refers to a junction of each timeline. Each of them flow from different past to different future, creating an infinite amount of intersections with others. Reality is just a complex network of events onto which we reflect sequences of past, present and future. These intertwined times are relative and are able to affect other flows of time around them. What we perceive as a time is a result of constant embodiment of continuous moments within a space. Conceptually, different space means different time and vice versa.

To project flow of time and transition of phase, we used ice melting slowly through time. We tried to make ices travel through each piece of string, embodying different times by melting in different points. When they meet at the same point, they would create ‘the moment’ shared with various timelines. This will show how those timelines interact with each other with different backgrounds and probably different directions they head to.