Unsaved Drawing is a video about the contrast of time spent making a drawing and life happening in an ordinary high street. It was made whilst I was working at an Exchange Bureau in Oxford Street - London. I was dead bored of working there. It was Christmas time, I could hear the sounds of the busy road but could not see it and I had no customers coming to challenge my day. The video reflects that boredom and the resilience of keep on going.
The making of the drawing was filmed from a computer screen but never saved. The abstract geometric drawing emerges in contrast with the actual sounds from outside - there is the noise of buses, footsteps and people talking in this busy high street we never see - pointing out how ordinary life happens, it carries on simultaneously with our worries, boredom or problems. The drawing is a space-time diagram illustrating simultaneity from one point of view in a Special Relativity experiment. In Special Relativity, observers moving at different velocities relative to each other have different notions of simultaneity. The point is that even though everything in the video is happening at the same time there is no ab
solute simultaneity. Each observer may define his/her own concept of simultaneity. The time spent on watching the video seemed much longer than the time spent making it because the busy high street sounds do not fit into the pace of the video. Our perception of time is altered by the juxtaposition of these two velocities. The fact that the drawing only mattered whilst it was being created challenges our perception of purpose and of meaning in our own lives.
