Danger Soft Mud

Documenting the “Danger Soft Mud” sign on the ocean coast

Daily photography over one year captures the dialectic between permanence and change, as the sign remains constant while the environment changes (Sugimoto, 2005; Ricoeur, 1984). Repetitive action allows for reflective practice (Schön, 1983) and subjective time perception, highlighting the continuous but intangible nature of temporal experience.

Every morning begins the same. I walk to the sea, photograph the Danger Soft Mud sign, and nothing changes. Nothing. The sign stands there, silent, immovable. A constant. Oblivious to the tides washing its feet, to snow covering its head, to the summer sun burning overhead. It does not care.

If it could speak, it might warn: “Step carefully. The mud could swallow you whole, and you would remain there, invisible, forever.”

But there is no mud. Nothing to swallow anyone. A sign warning of a danger that does not exist. Perhaps it would laugh if it could. Perhaps it would recognize me, this strange two-legged, two-handed creature who appears here every morning, holding something, shifting between curiosity and boredom, hope and fatigue. Always at seven-thirty. Always.

Perhaps it would ask:

“Why do you come here every day? What do you hold in your hand? Why do you stop in front of me?”

How could I explain? That I am proving a theory—that the present does not exist? That this ritual, this project, is a study of time and disappearance, of the fleeting, self-erasing moment? That each photograph is not a capture of the now, but a trace of what has already gone?

The sea moves, the light shifts, the wind reshapes the sand. Each frame measures time, yet in measuring, it annihilates the present it seeks to hold. Photography, here, is not merely documentation but a ritual: a witness and a negation at once. The video extends this: motion made tangible, the present dissolving into an imperceptible continuum.

And still, the sign waits. Silent. Constant. Perhaps one day I will tell it everything.

Danger Soft Mud: The visual erosion of the present through fixed-point observation in contemporary practice-based research

Danger Soft Mud version 2 with my own voice.

Version = Talking sign

Abstract

This article examines a practice-based moving image project that investigates the non-existence of the present through durational photographic documentation. Over 365 consecutive days, photographs were taken from a fixed spatial location at the ocean’s edge, each morning between 7 and 8 a.m. Centred on a warning sign that reads “Danger Soft Mud,” the work explores the conceptual instability of the “now.” The sign acts as a constant referent, while all surrounding conditions — tides, weather, animals, human presence — shift. Assembled into a time-compressed film, the work demonstrates how repetition, difference, and apparent constancy collectively expose the impossibility of grasping the present as a stable phenomenon. The article contextualizes the project within philosophical, scientific, and media theoretical discourses and proposes that contemporary visual practice can function as a site for ontological experimentation.

Introduction: the paradox of the present

Time, though omnipresent, evades direct experience. The idea of a discrete, perceptible “present” is both foundational and elusive. While everyday language depends on temporal references — past, present, future — philosophy and physics repeatedly dismantle the illusion of a stable “now.” The photographic image, long associated with capturing the instant, also participates in this illusion. But when reframed through durational, observational practices, it begins to reveal time’s instability.

This article examines a fixed-point photographic project developed as a practice-based investigation into this ontological instability. A camera, positioned each morning between 7 and 8 a.m. at the same location on the shoreline, captured a frame centered on a warning sign: “Danger Soft Mud.” While the sign remained visually constant, the world around it — the tide, birds, weather, humans — changed continuously. Over six months, this daily ritual produced 365 still images, later condensed into a seven-minute film. What emerges is not a record of change, but a meditation on the impossibility of fixity.

Methodology: fixed frame, fluid time

The methodological structure of the project was simple but rigorous: daily photographic capture from a fixed perspective, at approximately the same hour, regardless of weather or circumstance. This constraint-based approach aligns with conceptual art and durational performance traditions, where repetition is not reductive but generative.

The visual field was anchored by a single object — the “Danger Soft Mud” sign — chosen for its paradoxical qualities. It both warns of instability and pretends to be fixed. In scientific terms, it functions as a control variable, allowing perceptual attention to shift toward the multitude of uncontrolled, contingent phenomena surrounding it.

Editing the images into a filmic sequence imposed a temporal compression: 365 days translated into 7 minutes. This format mimics but also distorts real time, producing a form of accelerated perception. The viewer sees not stasis, but the rhythm of tides, the randomness of events, the fluctuations of light and motion. In this sense, the work functions as a phenomenological probe into the experience of time as flow.

Notebook

Every morning, when I photograph the Danger Soft Mud sign, I take this notebook with me to record the weather and the feelings the landscape and atmosphere evoke that day.

After photographing the Danger Soft Mud sign in the morning, I immediately record the weather conditions in a spreadsheet, along with the Internal Feedback values. The collected data are saved as a CSV file and processed using the Python programming language. Subsequently, the analysis is executed and visualised in the Jupyter Notebook application, allowing for the generation of easily interpretable graphs. See Figure 1, which presents the weather data, and Figure 2, which illustrates the Internal Feedback as a function of time.

01/02/2026 - 16/02/2026

Figure 1 Weekly Weather at the ‘Danger Soft Mud’ Sign

After photographing the Danger Soft Mud sign every morning for a full year—without sparing myself from adverse weather conditions—and deliberately refraining from travel in order to avoid missing a single day, I reached the completion of the image-making phase. What remains is the systematic processing of the collected data, the structuring of reflections, the formulation of conclusions, and the acts of selection, organization, presentation, and synthesis.

On the final day, I produced a short four-minute film that documents and makes perceptible the repetitive, disciplined nature of the daily routine, thereby providing insight into the temporal, physical, and methodological conditions under which the project was conducted.

Figure 2 Weekly Internal Feedback at the ‘Danger Soft Mud’ Sign

Danger Soft Mud as a Practice-Based Experiment

1. Introduction

Danger Soft Mud constitutes a central practice-based experiment within this research, designed to interrogate the ontological instability of the present moment. Emerging from the proposition that the present does not exist as a fixed or measurable temporal state, the project functions simultaneously as an empirical investigation and a poetic reflection. It examines the relationship between observation, duration, and disappearance through the medium of time-based photography and video.

The work consists of a series of daily photographs taken from an identical fixed point, depicting a coastal warning sign reading “Danger Soft Mud.” The sign, mundane yet symbolically charged, functions as a marker of instability and transition—both literally, in the shifting tides and sediments of the estuary, and metaphorically, in relation to human attempts to define boundaries within an ever-changing world. Through its repetitive structure, the project transforms documentation into a temporal experiment: a systematic observation of imperceptible change, an accumulation of absences where each image testifies not to what is, but to what has been.

The project is simultaneously empirical and conceptual, merging the rigor of observation with aesthetic sensitivity. It poses a fundamental question central to this PhD: can contemporary visual art render perceptible what is ontologically elusive—the “now”?

2. Philosophical Context and Theoretical Framework

2.1 Temporality and the non-existence of the present

Philosophically, Danger Soft Mud is situated within a lineage that problematises the notion of the present as a coherent ontological category. From Augustine’s reflections on the fleetingness of the “now” (Augustine, 2008) through Husserl’s phenomenology of retention and protention (Husserl, 1991), and Heidegger’s and Bergson’s conceptions of time as flow and duration (Heidegger, 1962; Bergson, 1911), Western thought has consistently demonstrated the impossibility of isolating the present as a stable entity.

For Augustine, the present “has no duration” (Augustine, 2008, p. 245); it is neither past nor future but the vanishing boundary between them. Husserl expands this idea into a temporal structure in which consciousness is always oriented simultaneously toward what has just been (retention) and what is about to occur (protention) (Husserl, 1991, p. 73). Bergson’s durée conceives time as indivisible continuity rather than a sequence of measurable units (Bergson, 1911, p. 29). In all three accounts, the present cannot be apprehended directly; it is an abstraction imposed upon a continuous process of becoming.

Danger Soft Mud operationalizes these ideas through photographic and video practice. Daily repetition functions as a phenomenological method, confronting time as lived experience rather than chronological measurement. Each image differs subtly in light, atmosphere, and material decay, highlighting the impossibility of capturing the same moment twice. The fixed camera position, intended to anchor perception, paradoxically emphasises the instability of the present. The “same” view becomes a catalogue of difference, visualising Deleuze’s notion of “difference in itself” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 40).

2.2 Phenomenology, memory, and anticipation

Husserl’s insight into the tripartite structure of temporal consciousness—retention, primal impression, and protention—provides a framework for understanding Danger Soft Mud (Husserl, 1991). Each photograph embodies both retention and protention: the captured image preserves what has already become past while simultaneously anticipating future observation. This duality foregrounds the paradoxical temporality of photography itself: the act of recording renders the present irretrievably absent.

Bergson’s durée informs the project’s engagement with time as continuity and flow. While individual photographs segment time into discrete instants, the series as a whole communicates duration, revealing time as a process rather than a point. The project thus situates the observer in a continuous temporal field, where the present is experienced as an interplay of memory and expectation rather than as a measurable instant.

3. Scientific and Empirical Dimensions

3.1 Observation, entropy, and the arrow of time

While grounded in philosophy, Danger Soft Mud engages with scientific conceptions of time. The project borrows its rigor from empirical observation, treating the series as a form of longitudinal study. Each photograph functions as a discrete data point, analogous to measurements of natural processes. Unlike quantitative data, however, these images resist total objectivity. They document not only physical changes but also the impossibility of capturing the present.

The project aligns with the concept of the arrow of time in thermodynamics, the unidirectional flow from order to disorder (Prigogine, 1980). Gradual environmental changes—tidal shifts, erosion, sediment displacement, and atmospheric variation—act as visual indicators of entropy. Each photograph captures irreversible change: once recorded, the configuration of the scene can never be reproduced exactly.

3.2 Photography as temporal sensor

The photographic apparatus functions as a temporal sensor, translating continuous environmental transformation into discrete images. Yet this act introduces paradox: recording a moment simultaneously removes it from the continuum of experience. The photograph both affirms and negates presence—it proves that something was, but only by confirming it is no longer. This paradox mirrors the philosophical problem of capturing the present: observation is inherently an act of temporal displacement.

4. Artistic and Media Ontology

4.1 Photography and the indexical nature of time

Barthes famously asserted that every photograph states “that-has-been” (Barthes, 1981, p. 80). Flusser complements this by framing the camera as an apparatus that automates perception while mediating temporality (Flusser, 2000, p. 27). Danger Soft Mud operationalizes these concepts by converting the mechanical act of photographing into a ritualised inquiry into temporal presence and absence. Repetition, performed daily, becomes a durational performance: a sustained engagement with the impossibility of stasis.

4.2 Video and duration

While the photographic series fragments time into discrete moments, the video iteration restores continuity, unfolding duration in real time. This enacts Bergson’s distinction between measured time (temps) and lived duration (durée). The viewer inhabits temporality rather than simply observing it, experiencing the ongoing dissolution of the present as an immersive process.

4.3 Comparative artistic practices

Danger Soft Mud engages with established artistic explorations of time:

On Kawara’s Date Paintings (1966–2014) record the passage of days as precise textual interventions. Kawara’s work asserts the present conceptually; each painting claims the day as “today,” yet its material existence is post facto—a marker of absence (Kawara, 2001). Danger Soft Mud diverges by refusing to assert the present at all, highlighting its erasure.
Tacita Dean’s time-based works, such as FILM (1993), utilise long durations and fixed camera positions to foreground the passage of time and environmental transformation. Dean’s work shares the attention to imperceptible change and duration with Danger Soft Mud, yet the latter foregrounds the philosophical thesis of the non-existence of the present.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes (1980s–present) explore time through long-exposure photography, rendering the ocean as a continuous field of duration. Like Sugimoto, Danger Soft Mud abstracts the temporal flux, but it does so in a serial, daily practice that foregrounds cumulative impermanence.

5. Temporal Aesthetics and Perceptual Experience

The aesthetic strategy of Danger Soft Mud lies in minimalism, repetition, and attention to subtle difference. Nothing overtly happens; yet, everything changes. This paradox embodies the central research question: the impossibility of representing the “now.” The project’s refusal of narrative foregrounds duration as perceptual experience. Repetition indexes temporal difference, reflecting the tension between memory, anticipation, and fleeting experience.

The project thus creates a temporal aesthetic where absence, impermanence, and subtle variation operate as the material of the work. In visual terms, time is not static but emergent, perceptible through differences and transformations rather than a discrete present.

6. Methodology: Practice-Based Approach

The project employs a practice-led methodology combining photographic observation, video documentation, and reflective writing. Daily photographic repetition from a fixed point constitutes the core practice, supported by the following:

Environmental Measurement: Recording light conditions, tidal changes, and sediment shifts to contextualise visual changes scientifically.
Sequential Documentation: Creating a chronological archive for analytical comparison of cumulative transformations.
Video Composition: Compiling time-lapse and real-time video to explore continuous duration.
Reflective Practice: Maintaining a research journal to contextualise observations, correlate visual phenomena with theoretical frameworks, and interrogate subjective experience of time.

This approach exemplifies the integration of scientific observation with artistic inquiry, reflecting the epistemological premise that time is experienced and understood as much through sensory and aesthetic encounter as through abstract measurement.

7. Analysis: Presence, Absence, and Visual Evidence

The analysis of the Danger Soft Mud series emphasises the following:

Displacement of the Present: Each photograph demonstrates the impossibility of capturing the “now”; the moment of exposure already resides in the past.
Cumulative Change: Subtle variations accumulate, rendering temporality perceptible only through juxtaposition of sequential images.
Material and Environmental Evidence: Erosion, tidal shifts, light, and atmospheric conditions provide indices of duration and impermanence.

The series thus becomes a temporal archive, where the absent present is rendered visible through its trace.

8. Conclusion

Danger Soft Mud exemplifies how contemporary visual art can interrogate the non-existence of the present through practice-based methods. The project merges empirical observation, philosophical reflection, and aesthetic practice, transforming perception into a site of inquiry. Time, in visual terms, is active and emergent, not a container to be measured or represented.

Through serial photography and video, the project renders the present perceptible only as absence, continuity, and change. The work performs temporality rather than depicts it, turning the landscape into an aesthetic laboratory of time. The camera’s fixed gaze becomes an instrument of metaphysical measurement, while the resulting images operate as residues of vanished moments. Danger Soft Mud thus embodies the central thesis of this research: the present, as we attempt to perceive or represent it, does not exist.

The application of the Balloon Time Model -------->

Danger Soft Mud and the Balloon Time Model

05/03/2026

Emotional Projection and Environmental Feedback in the Danger Soft Mud Project

In the latest phase of the project I introduced a new visual layer that addresses the subjective dimension of the observation process. I produced a series of more than ten expressive self-portraits representing different emotional states, including curiosity, excitement, fatigue, boredom, melancholy, discouragement, pride, contemplation, and quiet satisfaction. These facial images were digitally composited with the photograph of the Danger Soft Mud sign so that the sign appears to carry my own face. In this configuration the warning sign becomes an anthropomorphic object, functioning as a symbolic extension of the observer.

The conceptual intention of this intervention is to make visible the feedback relationship between the observer and the observed environment. During the daily photographic routine the physical conditions of the site, the wind, humidity, temperature, fog, rain, and light, have a direct influence on my own physical and emotional state. Standing at the same place each morning gradually revealed that the act of observation is not neutral: the landscape affects the observer just as the observer interprets the landscape. The emotional self-portraits therefore serve as visual indicators of this reciprocal relationship.

By merging the face images with the warning sign, the work illustrates a form of environmental feedback. The sign, the weather, and the surrounding landscape influence my perception and mood, and this internal response is then projected back into the visual system of the project. In this way the sign becomes a metaphorical interface through which the environment and the observer interact. The resulting composite images can be interpreted as visualisations of a loop between external conditions and subjective experience.

Methodologically, this experiment builds upon the existing structure of the project while introducing an additional phenomenological dimension. The research process can be described through several interconnected procedures.

First, the project relies on temporal repetition. The daily photograph taken at a fixed time establishes a controlled observational interval similar to a longitudinal study. The regularity of the act creates a stable temporal framework within which environmental variations become noticeable.

Second, the work uses spatial fixation. The camera position and framing remain constant, producing a stable visual reference system. Because the composition does not change, differences in weather, atmosphere, and light become the primary variables within the image.

Third, the project incorporates emotional indexing. The self-portraits function as a visual register of the observer’s internal state during the observational process. Each expression corresponds to a psychological condition that may emerge during the repeated encounters with the site.

Fourth, digital compositing is used as a conceptual strategy. By merging the face images with the sign, the photograph shifts from documentary representation toward conceptual visualisation. The sign is transformed into a hybrid object that symbolically unites the observer with the observed element of the landscape.

Finally, the resulting images were assembled into a short video animation. In this animated sequence the different emotional states appear in succession while the sign itself remains visually constant. This temporal unfolding highlights the fluctuation of subjective perception within an otherwise stable physical structure.

The feedback relationship between environment and observer further complicates the notion of a fixed present moment. The weather conditions, atmospheric changes, and spatial environment affect the observer’s bodily and emotional state, which in turn influences how the moment is experienced and interpreted. The composite images visualise this reciprocal interaction by embedding the observer’s expression directly into the sign that is being documented.

Within this framework, the Danger Soft Mud sign becomes more than a static object in the landscape. Through repetition, projection, and transformation it functions as a conceptual instrument within the research. It marks not only a physical location but also a point of interaction between environment, perception, and time.

The animation produced from the composite images further emphasises this process. As the emotional expressions change, the sign appears to “experience” different psychological states while remaining physically immobile. This visual paradox highlights the tension between physical stability and perceptual variability. The environment continuously changes, the observer responds to these changes, and this response is re-inscribed into the visual system of the work.

In this sense the experiment can be understood as a small methodological extension of the original project. While the daily photograph records environmental change, the composite images and animation introduce a reflective layer that documents how these changes affect the observer. The work therefore visualises a feedback loop between landscape, time, and human perception.

From the perspective of practice-based research, this experiment demonstrates how photographic and moving-image practices can function as investigative tools for exploring the temporal and perceptual instability of the present moment. The images do not simply document a place; they reveal a dynamic relationship between environment, observation, and subjective experience.

Many times I felt as if I myself were the Danger Soft Mud sign.

Many times I felt as if I myself were the Danger Soft Mud sign. I stood there motionless, exposed to everything, at once quietly observant, contemplative, sometimes tired, at other times strangely alert. Sometimes the cold wind penetrated to the bone and I stood there shivering, a little discouraged, yet stubbornly persistent on the shore. At other times the rain softly and steadily beat against my clothes, and I slowly became soaked; in those moments I felt sad, slowed down, and burdened with thoughts.

There were times when, beneath the grey sky, I gazed across the endless mud hopelessly, wearily, and bored. Yet at other moments the sun suddenly broke through the clouds and its warmth covered the wet shore with a golden shimmer. Then I felt satisfied, proud, even briefly happily relieved, as if the landscape itself had taken a breath.

Sometimes the fog slowly crept across the water and everything became mysterious, enigmatic, almost dreamlike. The wind would sometimes stir the air restlessly, while at other times a complete motionless silence descended upon the landscape. In these moments I entered a deeply reflective, meditative, slightly melancholic mood.

Whenever a huge ship appeared in the distance, I always watched it with wonder, curiosity, sometimes excitement, as it slowly approached. The massive body moved dignifiedly, almost majestically, across the water. In such moments I became lively, attentive, filled with a childlike sense of astonishment.

At times the faint outlines of the Welsh towns emerged on the opposite shore. When Cardiff slowly appeared from the mist, I felt excited, amazed, and absorbed in admiration. The silhouette of the city would appear and disappear again in the fog, and I watched this shifting vision with patient, attentive, and hopeful anticipation.

There were hours when I felt tired, quiet, and lonely, hearing only the cries of seagulls. At other times an alert, vivid, almost ceremonial atmosphere surrounded the place, as if the landscape were preparing for some unusual event.

Among the salty air, the wet mud, the slowly drifting clouds, and the mist hovering above the water, I sometimes felt as if I were truly just a sign on the shore: motionless, contemplative, watching time, at once sad and satisfied, tired and proud, bored and astonished, a silent witness to the landscape and to the passing of time.

Many times I felt as if I myself were the Danger Soft Mud sign.

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