## Introduction > The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. > — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus This article opens with a reimagining of subjectivity as a contingent phenomenon that arises through becoming-with the everyday. Grounded in my diaristic moving image practice, I explore subjectivity as a form of atmospheric dailiness—a condition in which the self is formed through perceptual, spatial, and affective resonance. In contrast to conventional notions of the self as singular, coherent, and narratively contained, I approach subjectivity as inherently fluid: a rhythm of becoming that is assembled and dissolved in relation to the textures of lived time. Such a subjectivity is shaped by iridescence and unfolds through atmospheric relations rather than fixed boundaries. I find perhaps its most resonant image in the sky at five o’clock—that liminal hour which names both dawn and dusk, and yet, in doing so, conceals their radical difference: one veils the world in thickening breath, the other in dispersing light. Though time speaks the same word, atmosphere refuses to echo it. This quiet dissonance gestures toward a conception of the self as conditionally surfacing, taking shape through momentary relational intensities. Like the sky, the subject cannot be reduced to a single name or narrative arc. It is, perhaps, something closer to a place of modulation—a zone where affective currents gather, shift, and dissolve, forming fleeting contours within the folds of time and space. The self, in this sense, does not reside; it happens—within the interstices of sensation, within the drift of everyday life. Since 2019, I have been constructing a visual and sonic archive by recording fragments of daily encounters—images, sounds, and gestures that arise without premeditation. This is not an effort to document a coherent self, but a practice of remaining attentive to the fleeting intensities of the present. My approach privileges resonance over capture, drift over direction, and resonance over representation. Through this practice, the diary becomes a performative site where the self is continuously reconfigured—a quoting voice that surfaces through repetition, variation, and deferral. It is from within this practice that the framework of atmospheric dailiness emerges—shaped through sensory modulation, affective residue, and temporal instability, as a way of thinking with the everyday. The textures gathered in this archive do not stabilise meaning, but suspend it; they do not construct identity, but unsettle it through movement, reverberation, and pause. In this sense, the diary does not illustrate theory—it performs it, allowing subjectivity to surface through the very conditions that the theory seeks to name. The framework of atmospheric dailiness engages a theoretical landscape concerned with rupture, modulation, and the architectures of staged experience. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of becoming foregrounds subjectivity as an unfolding event—nonlinear, impersonal, and continuous. Catherine Malabou’s explosive subjectivity intensifies this view, framing the self as shaped through irreversible breaks and moments of structural undoing. Some experiences settle quietly within me, layer by layer, expanding the world I already inhabit. Others arrive like a detonation—shattering the structures I have built and ushering me, without warning, into an entirely different world. One kind of experience fosters growth; the other demands metamorphosis. Thomas Elsaesser, writing on the aesthetics of contemporary experience, describes environments in which danger is rehearsed, identity is performed, and affect is carefully staged—spaces that are safe, familiar, and enclosed. Within these choreographed atmospheres, subjectivity surfaces through interruption and reconfiguration, activated momentarily and shaped by patterned intensities. The writing unfolds as a constellation of reflection and practice—moving through conceptual grounding, artistic process, and comparative dialogue, each responding to the rhythms of atmospheric dailiness in their own inflection. It begins by rethinking subjectivity through the intertwined lenses of atmosphere, affect, and dailiness. From there, I turn to my own artistic practice, where the process of archiving everyday fragments becomes a compositional method responsive to ephemerality, resonance, and drift. A further section enters into dialogue with the diaristic strategies of Jonas Mekas and Charlotte Prodger, drawing out the ways in which their respective approaches to time, voice, and fragmentation inform and contrast with my own. These strands converge in a reflective synthesis, where I reconsider the diary as a space of rhythmic surfacing—quotational, contingent, and unresolved. The article closes by returning to the broader stakes of this inquiry, suggesting that the self—like the sky at five—emerges through resonance, modulation, and the subtle insistence of the everyday.