mesophase

For a while, I was gravitating around the theme of depicting time through photography.

The present is capsulated and becomes the visual imprint of the past. That is one of the essences of photography. A photograph that has been taken in the past can be the reference of the same subject in the present. This is only possible because of the documentary nature of the medium.

In this art project, I apply this phenomenon to record the visual transformation of a modified subtractive process caused by physical impact on various Polaroid colour film sheets.

A sheet of unprocessed Polaroid is manually pressed at a certain point, thus the perfectly designed chemical reaction that was meant to develop the image on its photosensitive layer is determined to fail. The contribution of the chemicals is intentionally uneven causing an unpredictable confusion of materials. Manipulating the perfectly designed chemical process extremely prolongs its duration as well as creates shapes and forms which were not meant to be. By the passing time, various colours, shapes and marks appear. The event of visual transformation happens in a constantly decelerating fashion. Is the current state of the constellation being the final?

To find the answer, a photographic schedule was set up to capture the individual Polaroid sheets within the same timeframe tracking the phases of their transformation. The individual photos are installed in certain distances from each other representing the duration of time passed between each capture.

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MEZOPHASE

For a while, I was gravitating around the theme of depicting time through photography.

The present is capsulated and becomes the visual imprint of the past. That is one of the essences of photography. A photograph that has been taken in the past can be the reference of the same subject in the present. This is only possible because of the documentary nature of the medium.

In this art project, I apply this phenomenon to record the visual transformation of a modified subtractive process caused by physical impact on various Polaroid colour film sheets.

A sheet of unprocessed Polaroid is manually pressed at a certain point, thus the perfectly designed chemical reaction that was meant to develop the image on its photosensitive layer is determined to fail. The contribution of the chemicals is intentionally uneven causing an unpredictable confusion of materials. Manipulating the perfectly designed chemical process extremely prolongs its duration as well as creates shapes and forms which were not meant to be. By the passing time, various colours, shapes and marks appear. The event of visual transformation happens in a constantly decelerating fashion. Is the current state of the constellation being the final?

To find the answer, a photographic schedule was set up to capture the individual Polaroid sheets within the same timeframe tracking the phases of their transformation. The individual photos are installed in certain distances from each other representing the duration of time passed between each capture.