being and time ::: a daily photo lifetime project

This project aims to capture the aging of my body. Is it also an examination of the daily life: spaces, time, rituals, people, emotion, clothes, home, possessions, haircuts, books, memory, living, etcetera. Consider this archive a digital zoetrope that illustrates an idiosyncratic zeitgeist. The faces I make are based on whatever I feel at the moment. When I miss a day, it does not matter.

The act of taking a daily photo is a reminder to live in the moment. It is not narcissistic. In this effort I look into the past and see who I once was. Through the billows of internal dialogue I often forget this stance, but inevitably come full circle. I think this may be a suitable tool to allow my future children to see how my life has changed. A growing today changes history and perspective.

Have you ever thought about what your grandparents lives where like? What about your great-grandparents? Unequivocal context.

The title of this project "Being and Time" is referring to the book "Sein und Zeit" by Martin Heidegger. This book speaks all about Dasein; One of my favorite concepts.

I believe our generation is beginning to approach life differently. Technology has enabled a singular type of hindsight that can refresh perspective in realtime. This is a reminder that my life is not binary. I am a constant mutating hybrid, a grey zone, a living metamodern venn diagram. But really I'm over complicating things. I'm a simple human that wants to sit under the trees of ubuntu.

Watch how emotions oscillate akin to the waves of life. It was not intentional that the beginning is full of wild faces and recently there has been more expressions of the mundane daily stresses. Such is life. I would like to think the project has begun to mature.

The huge missing chunks from 2008 and 2009 was when I lived in Los Angeles. Life quickly became overloaded and stress smothered this project. Isn't it bizarre how an environment can alter such small and simple parts of your life? A few months after moving to Dallas in 2009, I started this project up again.

2003 - 2004 :: Dallas, TX
2004 - 2008 :: Chicago, IL
2008 - 2009 :: Los Angeles, CA
2009 - 2010 :: Dallas, TX
2010 - NOW :: Boston, MA

Zeitgeist is the cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, sociocultural direction or mood of an era. "The spirit of the times."

Analogous to the term Noosphere. "The sphere of human thought."

The noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. Teilhard argued that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega point, which he saw as the goal of history. The goal of history, then, is an apex of thought/consciousness.

Dasein translates from German to mean "being there" or "to exist".

Heidegger spent his entire life trying to answer the "question of being" and more specifically, trying to adequately define and understand what he called Dasein, the sort of being that is specific to humanity. Dasein is open to being, the kind of being that is aware of its existence.

Dasein consists of two parts: (1) it is the human being, and; (2) it asks the question of itself "what is being?"

To Heidegger, Dasein is everything: "the primary phenomenon is not the world, space, time, or history, but Dasein's being in the world, Dasein's spatiality, Dasein's temporality, or Dasein's historicity." Dasein is neither just an insect, nor a God, but in between.

--- Dasein is in each case mine (each one of us is a human being)
--- The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence. A dynamic, active, future oriented sense. Now these two characteristics of Dasein are unified in two modes of existence: authentic existence or inauthentic existence.
--- This means that there are two ways in which human beings can 'take up' their existence. Either as their own (authenticity) or, in some sense, as not their own (inauthenticity).

Metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern desire for sense and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all, between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, order and chaos, purity and corruption, clarity and ambiguity, between naïveté and knowingness. Indeed, metamodernism is an oscillation. It is the dynamic by which it expresses itself. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather it is a pendulum swinging between two poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings towards fanaticism, gravity pulls it back towards irony; the moment its irony sways towards apathy, gravity pulls it back towards enthusiasm.

"The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation. Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life."
--- Excerpt from Dune, by Frank Herbert

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.