Tega Brain - Keeping Time (Phenology Studies) Keeping Time portrays a complex biological system living through the…
Tega Brain - Keeping Time (Phenology Studies)
Keeping Time portrays a complex biological system living through the Anthropocene. The work is made by searching the Flickr database for images of particular plant species and laying these images out according to their time stamp. Photographs for each year are arranged in rows and are ordered across each row according to date. In this way, the project reveals the phenological patterns of various species over a twelve year period. Phenology is the timing of recurring biological events in animals and plants and is explored here through our online digital traces.
Since early 2008, roughly 40 million images have been uploaded to Flickr® every month making a rich, ever-growing digital collection that documents a vast range of human experience including our observations of other species. Keeping Time is made from over 5000 of these photos taken during the years 2002-2013.
The work also shows patterns of species visibility. Observing the number of photos taken throughout each year, we see that plants only become visible to us at particular moments in their life cycles - typically when a species flowers, but also when leaves turn red during fall and bud in spring. As such this project provides glimpses of widely held socio-cultural relationships to the species in question, showing some to have cultural significance as people’s names, names of places or use in events like festivals or weddings. The patterns in the resultant images are ambiguous, pointing to both seasonal and cultural correlations, deliberately resisting what theorist Benjamin Bratton refers to the staged transparency as the “staged transparency” of much visualization work.