Harvard GSD Public Program: Fall 2020–Spring 2021
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Another one of the projects commissioned to us over the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, was the poster design for Harvard GSD’s Fall 2020–Spring 2021 Public Program—which for reasons already known, would change its format from in person to online events.
Through dialogue and a collective approach, we addressed the philosophical and epistemological issues that the period of isolation was forcing us to question regarding the ways in which we inhabit this planet and how we give meaning to the use of space. The shift to new practices revealed the phenomenology of life marked by the passage of time. At that time, the days seemed out of synch and there were fewer displacements, therefore, fewer activities. With this, the ordinary calendar was somehow put on hold, which in turn influenced our relationship with space and time. During that period our experience with time became totally subjective, and was not always related to what we saw on the clock or on the calendar.
Giving up the convention of what “should be” [1] was the first approach to our concept in order to establish a new behavior: how to move in relation to space, to others and, above all, how to understand time. There is no turning back. We do not return to the same spot like clockwork, but the total amount of personal time will always rush towards an end. The day is a natural cycle and intertwines with the year as a natural period. These cycles serve as guides in which one day follows another, and it is a renewed return to the Sun that slightly changes its position throughout the year.
In our proposal, time is experienced in four dimensions: internal, external, retrospective and prospective. Unlike most other methods of measuring time, the hourglass concretely represents the present time as something that exists between the past and the future, and this has made it an enduring symbol of time itself. The hourglass, metaphorically, is often depicted as a symbol of the ephemerality if human existence. Sand reveals the entropic quality of nature as a natural law of energy dispersion and the tendency of physical systems to lose order. The flow of sand is an example of the non-reversibility of events.
We dropped the grid (used in the previous poster design for the Spring 2020 program) to represent time, and instead turned to language [2] and symbols [3] to discover ourselves and as a confirmation of our resilience: the capacity of human beings to find meaning in meaninglessness. We used color gradients that relate to changes in light throughout the day, under the premise of understanding time in relation to natural light calculation systems.
[1] Everything that is ideal, in concept or norm; the norm is the fundamental category of this logical world; but this principle of what “should be”, has no sense of ethical responsibility: it is nothing that should be because it is considered good, just or convenient, but the duty to be, indicates a form of imputation of acts of conduct.
[2] Conceptually we propose a polyphonic story, breaking free from news immediacy to make way for the personal and subjective.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
–Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
[3] We create subjective experiences of time, and that doesn’t always correlate with what we see on the clock or calendar.
