A Chronicle of the Vanishing Present
Instagram Stories ceased to be a form of “content” for me long ago. They are neither posts nor digital noise. They are a system for recording time—an attempt to hold on to reality at the very moment it begins to disappear.
Over the years, thousands of fragments have accumulated: streets, faces, expeditions, breakdowns, laboratory observations, chance discoveries, drifts, late-night conversations, flashes of light on walls, snow in industrial districts, strange objects, documents, photographs, sounds, texts and states of being. Gradually, all of this has become a continuous chronicle of the existence of the Research Institute of Astigmatism and of my own life within it.
History disappears faster than we can comprehend it. That is precisely why Stories have become one of my most important artistic tools. They work like an instant chrono-camera, recording not only an image, but the temperature of a moment, the tension of space, a state of consciousness and the atmosphere of an environment.
Every post is an act of preserving reality—an attempt to safeguard the fragile traces of time before the speed of everyday life destroys them.
Paradoxically, images that vanish after 24 hours turn out to be much closer to living memory than carefully constructed archives. They retain the breath of an event. A mistake. A trembling hand. A streetlight’s glow. A chance phrase. A trace of fatigue. These very imperfections make the record authentic.
For the Research Institute of Astigmatism, Stories have become a research practice in their own right: a field for observing the disintegration and transformation of visual reality. An archive of micro-events from which projects, exhibitions, expeditions and Sources of Visual Pleasure later emerge.
In essence, this continuous stream of posts is an attempt to build an alternative system of memory. Neither a museum archive nor an official record, but something living, unstable and flickering.
A kind of digital diary of drifting through time.
This archive continues to grow. And with it grows the map of my passage through reality.