Ken Okiishi

Being and/or Time

Ken Okiishi’s work Being and/or Time consists of every image taken with Okiishi’s iPhone over the period of three years in his hometown of New York. Flickering in chronological order at 24 images per second with 25,000 images in total. A visual diary of the digital age it simultaneously stages the city itself as a time-­image continuously remade by its own resident-­users. The work continues Okiishi’s exploration of zones of temporality within the context he lives in by including images from Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, each with its own temporalities. The title of the work is a reference to a book by controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger in which he seeks to analyze the concept of Being in relation to the notion of Time. Being and Time have profoundly influenced twentieth-century philosophy, particularly existentialism.