## Diary as Drifting Subjectivity The performativity of the diary fundamentally resides in its simultaneous and spontaneous documentation of everyday life, or in its capacity to witness the transformation of life in accordance with calendar-based time. During the age of Enlightenment and Sentimentalism, diaries employed psychological introspection as a means of moral self-perfection and emotional cultivation. This introspective function evolved in the first half of the nineteenth century, as Romantic diarists approached the form with a new historicist sensibility, recognising the self as shaped by broader temporal and cultural forces. In the latter half of the century, positivist thought reframed the diary as an instrument for scientific self-observation, tracing connections between internal states, external circumstances, and sensory experience. By the twentieth century, diaristic practice in art came to encompass diverse conceptions of subjectivity, often involving intentional acts of self-fashioning, whether aesthetically or politically motivated. Accordingly, the diary, as a practice rooted in dailiness, became central to a mode of inquiry into subjectivity that permits and preserves the dissonance of experience. It allows gestures to remain incomplete, voices to appear unannounced, and time to fold back upon itself. In this regard, Virginia Woolf's diary was both a record of detail through which to preserve precious memories and a space for practising and experimenting with writing. She viewed everyday life as the raw material of fiction, insisting that “‘the proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss” [@woolf_notitle_1988, 36]. The diary, as Woolf understood it, becomes a space in which presence does not assert itself but circulates; in which the self is not fixed or performed, but dispersed across tones, textures, and durations. It shows how one comes to know and to invent oneself. In this sense, the diary becomes less a matter of representation and more a matter of relation, less a fixing of identity than an attentiveness to its drift. My _Diaristic Project_ (2022–ongoing) seeks to expand the concept of dailiness within diaristic practice, fostering poetic expressions that cultivate an intimate relationship not only with the tools of recording but also with methods of archiving and operational processes. The diaristic mode navigates both the structured grid of the calendar and the fragmentary nature of fleeting moments, while simultaneously modulating lived experience into visual and tangible forms that emerge from the practice of everyday life. The performativity of writing a diary, therefore, lies in its simultaneous and spontaneous documentation of one's surroundings—an act of bearing witness to the transformation of experience through the fearless expression of what is vague and uncertain. Through this process, the diary structures the ways in which objects, words, concepts, practices, and perceptions intersect within a given temporal framework. Since 2019, I have been gathering fragments from my daily environment—images, sounds, textures, gestures—without the imperative to classify or define. The act itself is one of quiet accumulation: a continual assembling of moments that neither seek nor resist meaning, but instead hover in proximity to it. What emerges is not an archive in the conventional sense, but a fluid composition—an ephemeral repository of dailiness shaped by affective resonance and repetition. Here, affect does not operate as a recognisable emotion, but as a force that traverses the interval of experience-in-the-making, where _agencement_ takes form as a technique of differentiation [@manning_minor_2016, 125]. It moves the event not as a script but by attuning attention to its unfolding, allowing dispersed fragments to cohere without resolution [@manning_minor_2016, 154]. The outcome is not a finished work in the traditional sense, but an ongoing practice of sensing, gathering, and drifting. It resists closure. It resists monotonous authorship. Instead, it proposes an ecology of multiplicity—each element incomplete on its own, yet resonant in relation to others. This is the ethos of the diary within my practice: not to narrate the self, but to allow it to circulate across the porous surface of the everyday. The meaning of diaristic practice here resides in the miscellany itself, in its potential for expansion that can only be perceived as the density and intensity of sensation. It remains as a seed before the sprout can be named or interpreted, and gestures toward the moment of experience through its transformation into form. The camera, in this context, does not resemble the eye; it is neither a part of the body nor an extension of it. Rather, it operates as a substance of subjectivity—like a fishing net—catching fleeting moments from daily life: sudden movements or glimmers, imperceptible patterns or unheard sounds. I lift the camera only when those moments awaken me. I touch them through my eyes and cradle them with my camera—two distinct modes of sensation—at which point the question of what is real becomes irrelevant, as the two images come to coexist. The tactile sensation, mediated by light, is translated into two dark chambers: the camera and the brain. Among those who have worked within this diaristic mode, Jonas Mekas and Charlotte Prodger offer two distinct yet resonant approaches, each revealing how the diaristic can function as both aesthetic strategy and philosophical proposition. In engaging with their works, my aim is not to establish a position of opposition or alignment, but rather to enter into dialogue: tracing echoes, divergences, and conceptual overlaps, and asking how the moving image becomes a method of modulation and transfiguration—a practice of carving fragments of sensation from a bundle of light and shaping them on the canvas of moments. Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) was recognised both as a filmmaker and as a critic of experimental cinema, renowned for his pivotal role in the American underground and the new avant-garde movement. His diaristic method embodies the intricate and often contradictory interplay between cinematic form and materiality, bringing together the tactile qualities of footage and camera with the conceptual dimensions of cinema through the lens of poetic film. Initially using a Bolex camera, Mekas developed a handheld, responsive approach to filmmaking, later transitioning to a Sony video camera for quieter, more spontaneous shooting [@mekas_jonas_2011; @mekas_jonas_2017]. His films, notably in _Walden_ (1969) and _As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty_ (2000), consist of personal fragments, daily recordings, fleeting impressions, and spontaneous gestures. There is a gentleness in his method: a fidelity to the passing moment, a refusal to impose structure, and a commitment to the contingency of lived time. For Mekas, the cinematic is indistinguishable from life itself, as life becomes cinematic through a continuous fluctuation that redraws the boundary between public and personal space. As he reflected [@mekas_movie_2016, 152], > “For what is cinema really, if not images, dreams, and visions? We take one more step, and we give up all movies and we become movies […] we watch the images and dreams and fantasies that are taking place right there in our eye’s mind.” He described his shooting method as spontaneous and reactive, guided by sensation. In this process, in-camera editing responded directly to reality, while post-editing refined the footage by removing what he called “badly written ‘paragraphs’” [@mekas_jonas_2020, loc. 98 of 259]. Diaristic sentiment in his work swings between an intensely spiritual subjectivity and the material contingencies of film editing, encompassing this paradox rather than resolving it. As such, his practice resists stable categorisation: at times a form of live art or a durational process closer to performance than to recorded media; at other times, a compositional reordering of fragments and footage that moves beyond archival accumulation. This mode of collecting and composing resonates with the tactics of _détournement_ and _dérive_, wherein existing structures are drifted through, disrupted, or gently reoriented. In a 2015 interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Mekas reasserted the primacy of “poetic feeling,” describing it as the ultimate condensation of life—one that encompasses “place, time of the day, the weather, and your thoughts, feelings at that moment” and can exist “in any art, any medium, or life itself” [@mekas_filmmaker_2019]. This raises crucial questions: What does Mekas mean by a poetic attitude in practice? How does the moving image become a condensation of poetic experience? These inquiries illuminate the philosophical and methodological significance of Mekas’s diaristic practice, situating his work at the intersection of life and art. Through this mode of poetic diarism, Mekas does not present himself as a singular or interior voice, but rather as an othered self that interacts with the recorded past. In his images of himself, time folds—past and present overlap—extending the archive toward what Denis Hollier describes as “a filing system [that] is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic... its interior mobility allows for permanent reordering” [@hollier_notes_2005, 39]. But unlike the confrontational impulse of political _détournement_, my approach leans toward a poetics of gentle dislocation. It is not subversion, but deviation through softness—minor shifts that reposition attention rather than demand it. Joy, in this context, is not the result of affirmation, but of attunement: a quiet insistence on presence in the midst of distraction and dispersal. This process of accumulation and deferred assembly allows the archive to remain open. It never settles into a definitive form, nor does it demand closure. Instead, it invites return: the same footage speaks differently with each encounter. In this sense, the archive becomes a site of reactivation rather than preservation—an event-space rather than a storage unit, a festival of transient constellations rather than a catalogue of truths. The process of making or capturing footage in my practice is not directed toward linear narrative or the representation of real experience. Instead, this practice involves ladling out what remains untranslatable—before it congeals into experience, before it hardens into a recognisable reality. This is an active gesture, one that neither represents nor demonstrates subjective or objective experience, but instead opens up a space for sensing otherwise. The archive, in this context, is not built through selection or hierarchy, but through return. Repetition becomes a mode of attunement—a way of dwelling within the grain of dailiness rather than extracting meaning from it. Editing, then, is not a process of arrangement aimed at coherence, but a method of weaving intensities into a meshwork of moods, resistances, and echoes. It is born in ephemera and dies in pause. Diaristic practice, as I understand it, is an ancient modality of ethical action—enacted through the self-transformation of the would-be actor of subjectivity. In recent diaristic practices, artists have moved beyond the documentation of daily life or personal narrative. Instead, they combine disparate materials to explore the fluid and dispersive terrain of selfhood and subjectivity. In Charlotte Prodger’s (b. 1973) work, this fluidity is intensified through her use of diaristic footage and video, operating simultaneously across spatial and subjective registers. Her accumulation of autobiographical material—interweaving voiceovers, landscapes, temporal shifts, and fragmented texts—structures a form of lived cartography. As one critic observes, her videos “seem to move from location to location, traversing vast distances across space and time, scrambling the certainties of fixed coordinates” [@cuthbertson_behaviour_2021, 13]. Through these movements, Prodger connects the notion of selfhood to territorial space. Her films do not depict identity so much as they chart it—assembling fragments of text, memory, and spoken word into a spatial and affective dialogue. I bring Charlotte Prodger into this discussion not as a direct counterpart to Mekas, but as a way to explore how the diaristic unfolds differently across form, subjectivity, and spatial relation. Her work is more structurally restrained, even austere. Her images are slow, sparse, and deliberate. The diary here is not a flow of impressions, but a measured unveiling of thought, place, and bodily relation. Her approach aligns with a politics of self-representation—yet it resists transparency. The self is always in flux, situated but not fixed. Charlotte Prodger’s diaristic practice, particularly in works such as _Bridgit_ (2016) and _Stoneymollan Trail_ (2015), foregrounds the fragmented, embodied nature of subjectivity. Shot primarily on iPhones and marked by the artist’s own voice, her videos explore the instability of identity, particularly within queer experience. Prodger described her method of filming with a small camera as follows [@prodger_charlotte_2018]: > And if you’re filming in a landscape, and the wind is pushing the tiny microphone to its limit, like ripping it, and if you try and do a static shot, you see your body breathing. The systems of the body are enmeshed with the camera. It’s a kind of symbiosis, but also a kind of grappling […] People see a shot of a city in a film, I feel like often there’s an impulse to try to identify that space. Prodger’s method of gathering materials is deeply personal yet maintains a degree of distance. Drawing from a disparate assemblage of images, she interlaces sounds overheard in passing, gazes directed toward distant places, personal experiences, literature, science, and popular culture to construct a complex spatial narrative. In _Bridgit_, spatiality unfolds through a layering of narrative inside and outside the frame. Through recollected interactions from private spaces and the Scottish landscape, she composes what might be called portrait-territories of her life. The piece links personal memory to historical context through voiceover reflections on episodes from her teenage years: coming out in a rural environment, or having her gender identity misread. Her voice is present, but not cohesive—layered, interrupted, often in the past tense—blurring the line between reflection and immediacy. Her gaze is fixed on something in motion: her body, the forest floor, a moving train, or the surface of a passing boat. It is anchored, yet always drifting. Her work approaches space not as something to be bordered or secured, but as a site of cohabitation and exchange, extending the relationship between self and non-self. Through a parallel montage of spaces, Prodger presents the self not as fixed, but as a constantly shifting, interactive being. Her body appears only indirectly—through the movement of the camera she holds, through her shaky hands. Multiple voices and sounds stitch together transitions across different spatial registers, breaking down the singularity of “whereness” and forming a layered conversation. Her voice exists somewhere, but not within the frame; bodies appear and disperse, moving with geography rather than within it. This fluidity intensifies in _SaF05_ (2019), where transitions between modes of transport and the moving body evoke a heightened sense of spatial fracture. Her feet drive the camera forward as it tracks the lioness named SaF05, and accelerated shot changes and zooms further amplify this disjunction. It becomes difficult to tell whether the frame reveals a wall or the ground, whether the gaze is downward or forward. Textures appear stable and then dissolve rapidly—a raindrop on the lens briefly indicates that the camera is facing downward, but this recognition remains fleeting. As in her earlier works, where fingers entered the frame or the camera shook slightly, here too layers accumulate—only now through traces of the lioness, surveillance footage, and spatial disruptions. She constructs space not as a backdrop, but as a layered surface that thickens around the moving subject. The concerns articulated through the works of Mekas and Prodger outline a shared terrain of diaristic practice. Within this space, my own approach emerges through a distinct configuration of resonance, relation, and perceptual drift. In my moving image practice, the self does not speak but hums; it does not appear but flickers; it does not remember but circles on the edge of memory. The diary is not a window into the interior or a door to the someone-else, but a surface across which subjectivity drifts. Mekas offers the emotional immediacy of poetic presence. Prodger offers the conceptual density of embodied symbiosis. Building on these divergent yet resonant approaches, I trace a practice that neither narrates nor withholds. It hovers between articulation and silence, suggesting a self without fixed location, quoting itself in fragments. Her voice is there, but it does not explain; her images persist, but they do not elaborate. This notion of a quoting voice—one that repeats, refracts, and reactivates rather than originates, emerging through relational echo rather than expressive authorship—is central to how I conceive of diaristic subjectivity. It is a voice unmoored from authorship, a resonance that lingers without source. Here, resonance refers not to a stable transmission of meaning, but to an atmospheric persistence—a vibration that moves between gestures, impressions, and utterances, forming a field of affective continuity. This voice does not seek recognition or assert presence. It marks passage through repetition and dislocation, unfolding along a line that neither begins nor returns. The diary, then, becomes a site not of confession, but of atmospheric inscription.