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Time flies: digital collages illustrating observations about “psychological time”
Flashback 1993: As part of my Masters thesis at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany, I created a set of digital collages, which I recently came across while looking for some papers. Rediscovering these illustrations made me realize how much has changed in the world of technology for designers over the past 18 years.
I also realized how very much the idea of ‘time’ still resonates with me. We can’t turn back the hands of time, which is in opposition to our inner experience of time. How we perceive time is very much based on our current situation, and our way of seeing the world around us.
Obvious phenomena of the subjectivity of how we perceive time—like “how time flies”—are juxtaposed against the phenomenon of melancholia, where time often seem to move very slowly. Or how experiences from a week ago might slip our mind, while others—good or bad—linger seemingly forever.
Illustrating those observations was a challenge, but also lot of fun—and yes, the trying times are almost forgotten. Equipped with my own Apple Macintosh Performa (now vintage!), a scanner, and an inkjet color printer, I was experimenting and discovering all the features early Photoshop had to offer. I quickly learned how to use the program to create the image I envisioned. I researched and collected anything and everything that might have made good source material: various books, magazines, fabrics, papers; even objects set on my scanner (this was, of course, long before your everyday household owned a digital camera). So I scanned and scanned and scanned… one could say I actually became kind of a “digital hoarder”.
Unfortunately my Bernoullis became obsolete, which is why I no longer possess the digital source files for these collages.
What I do still own is my final bound theses with 22 illustrations that accompany the written part of my thesis. Here are some of my favorites…
“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”—Bertrand Russell
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered—the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls— bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory”—Marcel Proust
“Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.”—Neil Armstrong
“At times everyone must go through a place where everything is temporarily called into question (the reason for all of our depression), the passage over the swinging mountain bridge. The new is not yet, the old is no more; you pass over an abyss between two walls of rock. Solid was the rock behind you and secure once again will be the new. But now emptiness lies under your feet.”—Ludwig Hohl
“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”—William James
all illustrations copyright Joerg Dressler
Categories Design, Digital Media, Outside the Square
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These are beautiful! It’s nice to find old friends who take you back to a time long ago that, at the same time, seems like yesterday.
For whatever strange reason, my senses have been drawing me to things—as if by magnet—so that I may discover connections to my studies that abound exponentially.
I meandered over to this nostalgic url on route this morning, read Venus’s post—stellar dissection of branding and our attachment to the familiar—and then laid eyes on this and couldn’t draw myself away. On so many levels I can understand what you’ve done here and deeply see the foundation of many of your strengths in design. As I’ve been pealing away the layers of ‘reading’ and the history of language and art, I’m rediscovering my love of expressive symbolism and abstraction—the embedding of emotive, instinctual, guttural understandings—that which we see endlessly failed by discursive language.
These are not only beautiful but representative of that connection you draw on within your design work and formal painting. This is something so many artists cannot reach in their own development of expression. I’m so glad you re-found these pieces and shared them.
What a gift!
Thanks for the comment(s). So glad you like these. I can’t wait to hear (and see!!!) more about your studies…