Fragments of Diary
Authors: Moon Il Sun 
Published: June 2023

The newly developing video environment offers various types of approaches to self-writing or self-making, including digital montage with less expensive and complex software, social media platforms, and personal archives as an ongoing development of self. However, the craft and process of making moving image have been less discussed in terms of their artistic value because, most of the time, the process is considered a draft that will be removed from the finished work. My Diary Project (2022-ongoing) focuses on the new meaning of diaristic practice and diagrammatic mental space in the process of making influenced by Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project (2007), Walden (1969), and short videos on his website, exploring the ways in which the conception of “diaristic” can be practised as an art form.

The various diaristic practices create unique ways of crafting and making that cannot be defined in a specific structure, form, or purpose that can be called a genre. The concept of the diary started from the formal documentation of events, functions, and statistics for tribal and national archives and expanded to both the private and public spheres in the twenty-first century. Now, its meaning continues to both romantic and positivist sense, personal archive or recording memories, which requires an expanded understanding as an intimate artistic practice. This quasi-public and quasi-private practice contains the expression of inner thought, the regular record of daily life, the archive of memories, and commentary on self.

Jonas Mekas saw his practice through the lens of late Romanticism and poetic expression through the on-camera-editing and recording of daily life, widening the moving image field into craftsmanship and its performative qualities beyond the filmic machine. Using fragmentary elements from the personal archive, he creates intimate sensations in a set of frame spaces. Gilles Deleuze claims that the image we see on the screen is delimited from the rest of the world, spatially and temporally, in terms of the "whole of relations" but to which each set is open. Thus, the frame generates the whole of inner relations and bursts to the outside of the frame to the viewer as a new diagram.

Bringing Mekas and Deleuze together, my project explores poetic subjectivity through my personal video archive and multi-frame experiments with a handheld camera, diaristic expression, and representation of the whole. This method attempts to create a new diagrammatic relation between fragments of times, places, and self in daily life, questioning what new types of relational inner space those diaristic practices can make and what the relationship between the fragmentation of continuous and discontinuous time and space in the cinematic frame can be recontextualised in the concept of the diagram. In doing so, it not only traces the new meaning of the diaristic practice but also challenges ways of collecting and using the videos in cinematic practice both online and in the experiment, Diary Project (2022-ongoing). Finally, it expands the notion of the personal diary to the “fragmentations in diagram” in terms of expanding video frames in diaristic moving image practice.