Phase—Time

The "decisive moment" is a fiction. I carve out time's relentless flow, stacking it into a tower defying gravity. Yet, beside this monument of accumulated duration, a void of equal depth is hollowed out—a tension of presence and absence.

The "decisive moment" in photography is a constructed fiction of human perception. Rejecting this, I construct my own reality from the mundane, tedious landscape immediately outside my window. Carving out the relentless flow of time minute by minute, I accumulate it—redefining photography not as a flat, instantaneous record, but as a physical sediment of duration.

Phase—Time is an ongoing project that materializes the invisible concept of time into physical mass. Over 24 hours, I automatically photographed the view from my window in Wakayama every minute, capturing 1,440 consecutive frames. Resisting the rapid consumption of digital media, I manually extract each printed photograph into a perfect circle using a compass cutter, stacking them along the Z-axis. As I erect a cylindrical tower (positive) in defiance of gravity, a void of the exact same depth (negative) is hollowed out beside it. The total mass remains constant—an absolute equivalent exchange of time.

As the layers surpassed 500, a profound material transformation occurred. The delicate photographic paper mutated into a dense, mineral-like mass resembling obsidian, while the excavated void began to function as a lens—a "time tunnel" trapping and reflecting light. When the captured timeline descended into night, the prints turned entirely pitch black, amplifying the sheer weight and palpable reality of nothingness.

Within this grueling, repetitive labor, an inevitable somatic glitch emerged. Physical fatigue from the manual cutting induced a microscopic 0.5mm deviation in the radius. By the 1,000th layer, this bodily noise—compounded by the structural limits of adhesive-free stacking—brought the tower to the brink of collapse.

This distortion, born from the friction between mechanical automation and human intervention, manifested the body’s unavoidable resistance; it became the ultimate reality of the photograph. The physical defeat of my ego—my futile attempt to build a Tower of Babel against gravity—evolved the work from a monumental structure into a fragile, sculptural archive. I ceased to be an architect dominating time, becoming merely an archivist collecting its falling fragments.

The view from the summit of the tower is no different from the view gazing into the void. Ultimately, Phase—Time is not a mere exhibition of images, but a phenomenological apparatus designed to physically experience the mass, weight, and texture of time.