»8 seconds« by Berlin photographer Sarah Eick (*1974)
The exhibition »8 seconds« by Berlin photographer Sarah Eick (*1974) gives an insight into the artist’s past, special moments, which she has been recording in a calendar diary for twenty years. She photographed these moments – mainly memories from various trips to the USA – for eight seconds. The result is fascinating, flickering photographs, moments of blurriness, of imperfection in a world full of perfection.
In »8 seconds« I explore the question of the now. What is the now? How long does the now last? Is everything present? In a world full of AI and perfection, I have a need for something imperfect, a longing for blurriness and movement.
The long exposure of eight seconds creates a dynamic that lets the gaze sink into the depths. The images seem like a fragment of a memory that breaks out again in the present. Sarah Eick brings the past into the present, into the present of the gallery. The artist shares her own fulfilled time with us. She demands eight seconds of mental presence.
The idea that the present lasts approximately 8 seconds comes from the work of neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel. Pöppel is a German psychologist and neuroscientist who conducted research on human perception and the sense of time in the 1970s. Pöppel proposed that our conscious mind perceives the “now” in time windows of about two to three seconds, but these moments can be linked together to create a subjective experience of the present of about eight seconds. This time span refers to the idea that our brains are able to integrate information over a period of about eight seconds and perceive it as a coherent unit of the present.
Context and meaning: This 8-second rule is often mentioned in research on temporal integration and consciousness to explain how the brain processes and links together short periods of time. Within these eight seconds, our brains can group events and information together and experience them as a “unit of the present” before they pass into memory and become part of the past. Pöppel’s work has significant implications for our understanding of perception, memory and consciousness, although the exact duration of eight seconds is more of an approximation and may vary from individual to individual.
Studio Sarah Johanna Eick
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Photography
mail: contact@saraheick.com