Ephemerality
Academically, the term ephemeral constitutionally describes a diverse assortment of things and experiences, from digital media to types of streams.
[citation needed] Ephemeral streams can be difficult to "conceptually defin[e]"; those that are discontinuous, due to altering between aggradation or degradation, have the appearance of continual change.
[27] Ephemeral rivers sometimes form waterholes in geological depressions or areas scoured by erosion, and are common in arid regions of Australia.
[30] Diseases like malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya, zika and schistosomiasis are found in ephemeral waterbodies due to their vectors' relation toward and/or reliance on them.
Even the driest and lowest place in North America, Death Valley (more specifically Badwater Basin), became flooded with a short-lived ephemeral lake in the spring of 2005.
These islands appear when volcanic activity increases their height above sea level, but disappear over several years due to wave erosion.
[46] Objects which are ephemeral, per one perspective, are those whose compositional material experience chemical or physical changes and are thus permanently altered; this process occurs in a matter of decades.
[49][50][51] Due to them often outlasting their expressed purpose, these objects can be perceived as temporal and ontological oddities; ephemerality has been described as constitutionally liminal.
[55][56][57][58][59][60] The likes of food, clothes, novels, zines, illnesses, breath, regimes, persons, glass, ash and ephemera have been said to illustrate and/or be affected by ephemerality.
[68][69] Scholars such as Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin saw the distinctly and intentionally ephemeral practice of fashion as emblematic of modernity.
[75] Ephemerality has been relevant to a considerable amount of art; various artists have drawn upon the matter to explore time, memory, politics, emotions, spirituality and death.
[91] Hazlitt contended that such ephemerality was the result of widespread aestheticism, thus the creations were subject to being abruptly disregarded due to the cascading "gaze of fashion".
[96] Elisa New and Anna Akhmatova varyingly opined that poetry is a means of repealing mortal ephemerality, with Akhamatova invoking the aphorism ars longa, vita brevis ("skillfulness takes time and life is short").
[105] Digital media's encompassing archival process means that information of varying importance can either be affixed or ephemeral, the former seen as the more generally common outcome.
[109] Ephemeral acquired its common meaning of short-living in the mid-19th century and has connotations of passing time, fragility, change, disappearance, transformation, and the "philosophically ultimate vision of our own existence".
[123][124] In the digital realm, online interactions straddle permanency and ephemerality, new posts proliferate such that participants adopt a social norm that "the discourse will pass and be forgotten as the past".
[96][129]Within the context of modern media dissemination, YouTube videos, viral emails and photos have been identified as ephemeral; as have means of advertising, both physical and digital and the internet collectively.
[133] In 2009, Ian Christie considered that a substantial amount of modern media, aligned with "rapid proliferati[on]", "may prove much more ephemeral than the flip-book".
[137][138][84][139][140][141][142] Historically, the ephemerality of dreams was utilised in ample East Asian literature as a metaphor for immaterial reality whereas Baroque writings depicted the matter as analogous to life.
[143][144] Scholar of comparative literature Stuart Lasine noted that writers have frequently invoked ephemerality as a negative aspect of the human condition.
[107][153] Like a blade of grass, My frail body Treading the path to Kyoto Seeming to wander Amid the cloudy mist on Kinobe Pass.
[156][157][f] Muñoz posited that the physical proximation of dance, which coupled with the "shared rhythm", results in a unified yet ephemeral status of those engaged.
[84] Professor of Dance Mark Franko contended that the artform is approaching a state of being "post-ephemeral" while Diane Taylor viewed the lasting impact a performance may have as negating notions of ephemerality.
[115] Scheibe saw the likes of live theater, travel abroad, stand-up comedy, and political pundits as engendering greater ephemerality by reducing attention spans and sense of personal history.
[172] Marc Augé observed ephemerality as key to the likes of airports, malls, supermarkets, office blocks, and hotels thus rendering them, per his definition, "non-places".
[173] Architecture scholar Anastasia Karandinou argued that the practice's modern relation to ephemerality correlated with digital media's evolution, which she says has enabled new conceptions of space and everyday thinking.
