Minute 45

MInute 45 (by Selin Lewandowski)

Similarly to minute 26, I also immediately had a million ideas running through my mind. The biggest were notions of death and decay. However, I struggled much more with this than with my first minute. At first, it felt easy, I thought to myself: Okay obviously it’s decay let’s not focus on that right now and just do Minute 26 first. However, the closer I got to my presentation date the more lost I felt. My original idea was to collect images of various things in decay and make a video of it, possibly also writing a poem or something similar and reading it over the presentation, however, that did not turn out the way I wanted and I also really did not want people to be burdened with a bunch of dead animals, so I had to change strategies. 

I learned to crochet during the pandemic, as many people did, and thought to myself, what a waste if I can't even use it once in an academic context, so that’s where my base came from. 

Looking at Minute 45 more and more I realized that it’s not just decay, the few seconds of the buzzing city one can see are of equal importance. In the beginning, it felt like going from chaos to order, which is why I started by pulling all of my yarn apart and creating a mess that looked similar to the insects that were crawling around on the screen. I wanted to crochet houses to recreate the city. After a while, I realized that both, the buzzing of the city and the buzzing of the animals felt similarly chaotic. So I overlapped the houses on top of each other to create a distinct but yet slightly similar feel of chaos. To bring my point across even more I decided to play both videos at the same time, one going forward, and one backward, to make the audience confused and to really make them feel like my video was chaotic. This, paired with the original music, and excerpts of the minute helped create that feeling. I left a few frames purposefully in colour to add another level of confusion. By seeing it so fleetingly one is not sure what the purpose is and if it’s even really there. It is the same way as seeing someone briefly passing on the street and you don’t even have time for a second look. It is fleeting, chaotic, and everywhere around us.