I have to say, at 9:20 in the morning, it's nice to have a class that starts off with a music video. The first two classes we began our day watching and analyzing two music videos directed by Michel Gondry. Both dealt with time in odd ways, one in a cyclical way and the other questioning past and future. I thought the Kylie Minogue video “Come Into My World" was easy to understand and not too interesting, but when it came to "Sugar Water" by Cibo Matto I was a lot more confused and had a lot more fun analyzing it and putting together the time puzzle with the rest of the class. Time was a very important element in the video because frames were playing backwards and forwards yet somehow the director managed to line up everything perfectly. Michel Gondry definitely likes to mess with our perception of time. Since we watched the first video I’ve been thinking of the movie Run Lola Run*, a movie in which time plays the most important role. It is a twenty minute situation that is played three times, each time changed with a minor event. After watching it I felt like every single movement I made was going to change the rest of my life drastically. When I analyze time a lot I sometimes feel the same way and my brain hurts.  

In the first reading we were assigned, Jerry Saltz asked “Can art change the world?” but I don’t think that can be answered with a yes or a no. I thought about the New York Times I see every morning and how there’s always a large photograph on the front page that catches my attention. If photography is included in the question of whether or not art can change the world I think we would all agree that it has done plenty. It’s a more relatable insight to what is happening in the ever changing world around us. 100 Photos That Changed the World. I think if any of these (photos in the previous link) were painted or drawn they would maybe have slightly less of an impact but they would all be pretty powerful.

The second reading, What is Time?, by JG Whitrow, was surprising to be assigned for an art class. It was pretty much the history of time, something I have not read or heard much about, and something, like Whitrow said, most people can not explain. “Although there are many important ideas that most of us agree we do not understand, only time has this peculiar quality which makes us feel intuitively that we understand it perfectly so long as we are not asked to explain what we meant by it.” In this reading Whitrow does what most of us are incapable of and answers the question.

I would love to learn more about how our perception of time changes throughout our life as we grow. “Logtime is the cognitive hypothesis that our age is our basis for estimating time intervals, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older. A simple mathematical analysis shows that our time perception should be logarithmic, giving us a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar. Our perception of aging seems to follow the same (Weber-Fechner) law as our perception of physical stimuli.” (http://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html)


I am a bit confused about the meaning of cyclical time... I feel like everything we do and the way we keep track of time is in cycles. Weeks, months, years and then we repeat. Is that not what is meant by cyclical time? 

*I see you’ve mentioned it in the syllabus!