Time to Measure Space and Space to Measure Time is a series of four 2 meter x 2 meter fabric cyanotypes. An experimental photographic print made by applying chemical emulsion to a two dimensional surface, a cyanotype is a physical mark of the sun conditions at any given spatial-temporal coordinate. Depending on place-specific mineral composition and pH level, a cyanotype’s quintessential blue hue can be additionally altered by water quality. What is blue in our cultural imaginary? Over the course of this term I stopped conceiving of blue as melancholy in favor of the German romantics’ eternal inward inquiry. Blue gets at the essence of emotion, just as cyanotypes represent the essence of capturing a form - the absence of light created by a thing’s physical contours. 

To explore the limits of the cyanotype, I turned to ideas from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Helga Schmidt’s time based artistic practice. In accordance with Castorp’s spiraling sojourn at the sanatorium, I have begun to understand that the experience of time is a correlative of measurable space. Hence, I designed my own time experiment based upon space as the time-giver itself; or in other words, confinement. How does it feel to navigate a finite enclosed space? I decided to spend three days within the bounds of my bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and hallway that connects them and document the process through large scale fabric cyanotypes. By removing myself somewhat from the socio-temporal order, these 72 hours allowed me to recognize and heed to my own bio temporal patterns. 

In attempting this act of confinement, I was motivated by the imperative to dissect the seemingly “natural” quality of socially constructed frameworks. The notion of time as socially constructed is paramount to understanding the value of destigmatizing and demystifying illness (which relies heavily upon the delineation between natural/unnatural , normal/abnormal). Throughout the narrative of The Magic Mountain, Castorp realizes that all of our temporal measurements are just conventions. Who is to say that time flows uniformly? Illness has the potential to destabilize the unexamined “normal.” Perhaps this lies at the root of our dismissal of experience(s) with illness. In Metamorphosis, this unique temporality of illness manifests in Gregor’s progression away from a strict adherence to timetables and train schedules and into an uncertain, unstructured perpetuity. 

 In attempts to visually capture some mark of my experience of time - the contours of the space and how I occupied it - I covered the apartment with cyanotype fabric. After living with these large fabric sheets and producing prints from the light blocked by the forms of my body and my objects, I realized they speak much more directly to a distilled relationship between space and time than to my specific inhabitance. An exposure time of three days rather than a third of a second (as a normal camera might do) effaced my individual sun-blocking actions in favor of revealing a more longitudinal sense of the space itself through how the shape of the architecture received light during the sun’s arc across the sky. The prints also point to how much light exposure different rooms normally receive. 

 My resulting cyanotypes are of an abstract quality which I feel speaks to the rhythms of light - in some regards, a visual sense of time determined by the ways in which the light is enabled to move within the space. Although my research into Helga Schmidt’s work informed the formation of the project, after processing the prints I began to conduct research into ideas of rhythm as they relate to temporality. Theorist Paola Crespi likens rhythm to a ghost. She quotes Derrida: “Rhythm has always haunted our tradition, without ever reaching the center of its concerns” (4). She continues to explain that rhythm is a slippery concept to define - nothing seems to quite do it justice. It cannot be confined to the channels in which communication operates (3). Reflecting upon my project, I hope to sit with a similar sense of pertinent ambiguity. During my exaggerated confinement, temporality felt as if it dissolved into simply a rhythm. If rhythm sits at the core of temporal experience, perhaps experiencing illness involves a fundamental shift in internal rhythms - one which may at times be both generative and uncomfortable.  

click here to view larger images of each cyanotype!

Works Cited
Crespi, Paola, and Sunil Manghani. “Rhythm, Rhuthmos and Rhythmanalysis.” Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practices, edited by
Paola Crespi and Sunil Manghani, Edinburgh University Press, EDINBURGH, 2020, pp. 3–19. 

Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. 1915. 

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Penguin Random House. 2005.

Schmidt, Helga. Uchronia: Designing Time. 2020.