Thursday Salute to Originals: Hustle Without the Bustle
The state of being “busy” is constantly celebrated in the workplace, particularly in this office full of designers and creators. We race towards drawing deadlines, hammer out coordination emails at lightning speeds, and revel in late night design vignettes. And for those of us with a longer commute, even the morning trip to work can be fraught with its own dose of busy. As our time is relentlessly consumed in meetings, phone calls, drawings, and emails, on most days we glance up at the clock in wonderment that an entire day has already passed (wasn’t it just 9:30 am?).
As the antidote to busy, and a direct reminder of our twisted relationship to time, artist Adam Magyar slows down our bustling cities into slow motion films. Simply changing the pace at which we observe an everyday activity, such as descending the stairs of a subway station, grants a whole new perspective. In Magyar’s latest film, “Array #1”, we observe a packed crowd in a Seoul subway station. While the context tells us this is a busy rush hour scene, the extreme slow motion allows us to focus on individuals and their drawn-out motions, elevating the scene to performance art rather than an everyday occurrence.
Array #1 from Adam Magyar on Vimeo
If you’re as impatient as some of us at GPI, the film itself can even be challenging to watch through to the end! Today we salute Adam Magyar for reminding us that slowing down the pace of our daily work can sharpen our senses, and may lead to deeper revelations within the design problems we race to solve.