(Media Activity — watching and reflecting on a film, 1+ hour)
For this impulse a friend recommended me a movie to watch. So I followed his suggestion and watched Perfect Days (2023) by Wim Wenders. It is not a film about art, nor design. But while watching it, I realised that it connects to my thesis topic almost perfectly: attention.
The film follows a man living in Tokyo who works as a toilet cleaner. His days are repetitive and quiet. He wakes up, goes to work, eats, reads, takes photos and repeats. At first glance, nothing “special” happens. And that is why it became such a strong impulse for me.
One of the core questions in my thesis is: why do we ignore most of what is around us? And what makes certain everyday situations suddenly feel meaningful? In my research, this often happens through accidental installations in public space, arrangements of objects that appear without intention, without authorship, and without explanation. In Perfect Days, the same mechanism is explored, but through storytelling instead of photography.
The main character is someone who notices. Not in a dramatic way and not with a big artistic gesture. He notices small things because he is present. Light through leaves, reflections, textures, routines, tiny shifts in the city. The film shows that attention is not a talent, it is a practice.
The film suggests it is all about what you choose: the city is full of moments all the time. You just have to choose to start looking.
Another thing the film made clear is that meaning does not always come from interpretation. Sometimes meaning comes from repetition. The film repeats similar scenes over and over again and slowly, they become loaded. Not because the scenes change a lot, but because the viewer becomes more sensitive. This is similar to what happens in my archive. A single photograph might feel like a joke. But when many similar situations are collected, patterns start to appear. The work becomes less about one funny moment and more about a visual culture.
What I also found relevant is the way the film treats public space. It does not romanticise the city, but it also doesn’t treat it as anonymous. Public space becomes a place of small encounters, invisible labour, and unspoken rules. This connects directly to my thesis, because everyday installations often exist in the gaps of those rules: between private and public, between order and disorder, between function and accident.
The biggest insight from this impulse is that my thesis is about attention as a design question. Who is allowed to slow down? Who is allowed to look? And what happens when we treat the ordinary as something worth noticing?
Perfect Days feels like the opposite of Instagram. It is slow, quiet and almost stubbornly unoptimized. But that is exactly why it matters. It reminded me that the work I’m doing is not only about documenting “cool finds.” It is about training perception. And about making space for a different way of seeing.
Links
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/perfect_days
AI Disclaimer
This blog post was written with the assistance of AI.
