How can time still be visually represented in an age when the image no longer documents reality but generates it?
Between Times explores the relationship between memory, image, and temporality within the context of post-photography. The project starts from a fundamental observation: in the traditional photographic paradigm, time was fixed in a luminous trace — proof of passage. In the algorithmic age, however, time becomes fluid, reversible, and reconfigurable, translated into datasets, probabilities, and automated visual interpretations.
The series proposes a poetic archive of instability — an augmented memory that refuses fixity and accepts transformation as a form of visual truth. The works do not reproduce reality, but simulate it poetically, building territories of reflection at the boundary between document and simulacrum, between the analogue traces of light and the numerical structures generated automatically.
The project aligns with Walter Benjamin's reflections on the disappearance of aura in technical reproduction and with Lev Manovich's concept of image-as-process — the digital image as flux and transformation, not as static object.
The series's critical reflection translates into visual language what Roland Barthes described as the punctum — the detail that pierces the gaze and re-establishes affective connection with the past. Here, this punctum does not come from reality, but from the improbable textures generated by the algorithm: the artificial that evokes authenticity.
The experience of the works is contemplative, almost meditative. The images offer not a narrative but a state — the suspension between memory and projection — in keeping with Hito Steyerl's concept of the slow image, which advocates for a slow and reflexive perception within the accelerated visual flux.
The series was made in Adobe Photoshop, through algorithmic generation starting from textual descriptions conceived to evoke themes such as suspended memory, fragments of time, traces of reality, or space between worlds.
Technology functioned as a creative partner, but control over the final meaning remained in the hands of the artist — lights, selection, and composition were deliberately configured to convey a tension between time, memory, and loss.
Between Times confirms the operation of the Attention–Intention–Message model as a simultaneous instrument of construction and reading.
Orchestrated through the direction of light and axial composition around the symbolic core — the hourglass — which holds the gaze and gives rhythm to the visual path.
The restoration of the fragility of time and memory, manifested through the choice of secondary objects — globe, book, lantern — and through post-processing decisions that dilate temporality.
The shift from document to meditative space, in which the human remains the centre of meaning.
Time is not what passes, but what we carry.
The recurring symbols — the hourglass, the clock, the human figure, the tree — are reconfigured and placed within oneiric visual spaces, each work proposing a distinct relationship with time as living matter.
An oversized hourglass dominates the visual space, axis mundi of the composition. A human figure seated on its edge, accessible by a tall ladder, appears caught in a fragile balance between past and future. Around it, sign-objects: a vintage clock without hands, a glass globe, a closed book marked by a cross, a faint lantern. A visual meditation on time, introspection, and knowledge — a scene suspended between matter and idea.
A monumental leafless tree, lit from behind as in a ritual, with visible roots and hourglasses hanging from its branches. On the right, a child runs toward the tree and an old man with a cane walks away — a line of life on a diagonal. The tree is not the biological one, but the inner tree of memory and personal genealogy. The hourglasses do not measure mechanical time but fragment it into sequences of introspection.
A vintage clock with Roman numerals, centrally placed, stopped at 11:45. Within the dial, a semi-transparent figure looks outward; from outside, a masked silhouette extends a hand in a gesture of greeting. The clock becomes a portal — a meeting chamber between temporal layers of identity. The handshake is not formal but ritual: a recognition of continuity, a reconciliation between versions of the self.
An oversized pocket watch, central, surrounded by smaller clocks and scattered coins. A human figure of diminished size appears to push the large watch — a seemingly futile, yet profoundly human gesture. In the background, a leafless tree and a barely visible spectral face. An allegory of inner resistance: about the dignity of the gesture that is measured not in success, but in intention.
An arid, almost post-apocalyptic landscape, dotted with hourglasses of various sizes — some upright, others overturned or broken. Human silhouettes move in different directions, each carrying an hourglass in their arms or on their back. The hourglass becomes an extension of the body, an existential appendage. A world of temporal solitude, where each person carries their own rhythm. The image asks: how do we carry our time?
A massive hourglass, central, in which a human silhouette digs into the sand with a pickaxe — a struggle against the inevitable flow. Around it, glass fragments, broken spheres, a damaged pocket watch, an abandoned hammer. The hourglass is both symbolic prison and space for action. An allegory of Sisyphean effort: we are miners of our own time, working between the sand that falls and the glass that breaks.
The six works do not function as mere illustrative supports for theoretical concepts, but as autonomous instances of artistic reflection. They become spaces of poetic thought, where symbols rearrange and acquire new meanings. In each of them, time is not only a subject but a living matter, a modellable element, transposed into an aesthetics of fragility and paradox.
Each composition proposes a distinct relationship with time: The City of Time evokes the temporality that organises social existence; The Genealogy of Time explores memory and filiation; Dialogue in Time opens a space of encounter between generations; The Resistance of Time captures the tension between fragility and force; Bearers of Time assigns the human being the role of vector of temporality; and The Miner of Time evokes the inner labour of digging into the strata of memory.
Through this work, the digital artist is not just a technician of the image, but a visual thinker — the one who transforms time into an artistic material, memory into a plastic texture, and introspection into a symbolic landscape. What is outlined is not merely an artistic project, but a space of reflection in which time becomes visible and memory breathes through form.
All 6 works of the series · generative digital art.
The project Between Times is documented and analysed in the monograph De la real la augmentat. Artistul vizual în epoca post-fotografică (Reșița, 2026), where it constitutes the first case study of personal artistic practice, in chapter 19.
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