A Moment of Happiness

Photos & video by Aleksandar Kujučev

In our family photo albums and home videos we are trying to preserve moments of happiness, to freeze them in time, prevent them from fading out from our memories.

This project consists of two parts, first being a series of photographs and second consisting of two videos.

Photos:
Since the birth of my son I've spent lots of time taking photos of him for our family album.
Photos presented here, came along. He's not to be seen on any of them. There is only secondary evidence of his existence - his toys in the surrounding of our apartment.
These photos can not be regarded as a family album material, since they are not documenting any distinct moment of his life.
Photographed without any reference to the particular place in time, separated from their function, these toys are just assembly of lifeless forms that will continue to exist much longer than any of us, simply due to their more lasting molecular structure.
Enlarged, these photos are meant to be sort of a sinister reminder of our fragile existence.
Videos:
First video is the typical home video, a holiday video of my son in a swimming pool, edited into an endless loop. Opposed to the first clip featuring youth of a child, preserved forever, I made an attempt in the second video to abandon its standard use for preserving fragments of time, by trying to simulate passing of it. Source clip was some recording of me being happy. Final video is produced by making copies of the same clip using two VCRs, switching between two tapes in them. The image quality slowly deteriorates as each 5 second fragment of tape is repeatedly duplicated from the previous strip, efectively making a copy of the copy and so on. This technique coincides with the recent theories dealing with the process of ageing. During our lifetime, new cells of our body tissues are constantly produced, replacing the old ones. Our genetic material gets duplicated too and it is incorporated in new cells. Over long period of time, since our genes are duplicates of a duplicate, inevitable duplicating errors are building up, leading to progressive decay of our bodies. Final stadium is death, leading to total decomposition - transformation back into chaos of elementary particles of which all the matter is created from. In a certain way, it resembles the video noise that is the final result of constant video tape rerecording, resulting in progressively deteriorating video image quality. In normal video recording, particles in the magnetic layer of a video tape are well organized and they are providing a high quality noise-free signal. In case of a deteriorated recording, video noise is increasing as magnetic particles are approaching a state of total chaos.

Within the Project ”A Moment of Happiness 2”, Aleksandar Kujučev had two solo exhibitions during May 2010 in Tokyo, Japan.
Photographs and videos from the series ”A Moment of Happiness” were exhibited in the Zuisho-ji Art Project Gallery.
Ms. Nobuko Akikawa was the curator for both exhibitions.

http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2010/6EF3
http://www.zuisho-ji-arts.net/?p=232

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