The Shape of a Year

My exploration of time began quite unexpectedly.

One day I was trying to pinpoint the date of a particular experience that had happened about a year earlier. As I went back through the months in my mind, trying to locate it, I suddenly became aware of how I was navigating the year. I wasn't seeing a conventional calendar. The months seemed to occupy particular positions in relation to one another, and the year had a shape and direction to it.

I tried to put it down on paper.

What I drew made complete sense to me, but looked nothing like the calendar we all use. That fascinated me. If this was how I saw a year in my mind, how did other people see theirs?

I tried the same exercise with my brother, then with some friends. I asked them to think of a calendar year, from January to December, and draw how they saw it in their mind. As the exploration continued, the collection grew.

Everyone's was different.

Some were circular, some linear. Others turned, folded, stacked or extended into space in ways that were harder to describe. The months occupied different positions and previous and future years continued in different directions.

We were all using the same twelve months and essentially the same system for measuring a year, yet internally we had constructed completely different versions of it.

I also began to notice what felt like a relationship between the drawings and the people who made them. The way someone organized time spatially seemed to offer a small glimpse into how they thought or oriented themselves. It wasn't something I could quantify, but it was there.

The drawings started to feel a little like fingerprints. We share the same system, but our internal experience of it is quite personal.

That observation led me to a larger question: if we all measure time through the same systems, why do we experience it so differently?

We measure time constantly — seconds, hours, days, months, years. Clocks divide it into intervals. Calendars arrange it into sequences. These systems give something intangible a structure we can collectively understand.

But measured time and experienced time are not quite the same thing.

As I continued the research, I began to think about time through two interconnected qualities: quantified and sensorial.

Quantified time could be broken down into interval, duration, sequence, overlap and trace.

An interval gives time a limit. Duration is what happens within that interval.

Sequence places one moment in relation to another. Overlap allows different events and durations to exist at the same time within a larger context. And trace is the evidence that something has occurred at all — a mark of presence, passage or change.

Sensorial time is more personal.

It is connected to association and memory, and can be triggered by scent, sound, taste, sight or texture.

When we think back on a period of our lives, we don't necessarily remember it according to its measured duration. An entire month can become vague, while a moment lasting only a few seconds can stay incredibly clear.

A smell can take you somewhere.

So can a particular quality of light, a taste, a texture or a sound.

This led me to think of time as a kind of container for selective memories and emotions. The way we experience and recall it is affected by who we are, where we come from, our age and what we have lived through.

The calendar may tell us when something happened, but that isn't necessarily how the experience stays with us.

This thinking eventually developed into Sound of the Year.

I became particularly interested in sound because of how temporary it is. A sound happens and then it is gone. There is no physical object left behind, yet sound can carry an incredibly strong memory.

A voice in another room. Water running. Traffic outside. A train. Cutlery against a plate. A piece of music.

At the time, these sounds may seem completely ordinary. Heard again much later, a few seconds can bring back a place, a person or a moment with surprising clarity.

Sound of the Year proposed recording five seconds of sound every day for one year.

The five seconds didn't need to represent the most important event of that day. In fact, that wasn't really the point. It was simply a fragment of that particular day.

Once recorded, the sound wouldn't remain immediately accessible. The fragments would accumulate over time — days becoming months, and months eventually becoming a year.

The object became a container for that elapsed time.

Only later would those sounds be encountered again.

The year could then be experienced not as 365 numbered days, but through fragments of what had passed. Some sounds might be immediately recognizable.

Others might mean nothing at all. And some might unexpectedly bring back an entire memory from only a few seconds of sound.

The idea wasn't to reconstruct the year accurately.

It was more about questioning what remains of a period of time once its measured structure falls away.

Because the way we remember time doesn't really resemble a calendar.

It compresses and expands. Things overlap. Some periods disappear almost completely, while others stay unusually present. Memories surface through association, sometimes without us consciously looking for them.

And they leave traces.

The calendar drawings had already shown me how differently we can visualize the same measured year. Sound of the Year became another way of exploring that same idea.

If our internal image of time is individual, perhaps what remains of it is individual too.

Years later, I realize I am still exploring variations of the same question.

Not necessarily how to represent time itself, but how to recognize its passage — through a mark left behind, a memory triggered by a sound, a change from one state to another, or the space between what was there and what remains.

Presence. Passage. Change.

Maybe we don't experience time itself as much as we experience what happens within it, what it changes, and what it leaves behind.