THE PRESENT DOES NOT EXIST: The Balloon Time Model and Temporal Absence in Photographic and Moving-Image Practice

The Present Does Not Exist is a practice-based monograph on time, absence, photography, moving image, and the elusive status of the present. Written by Geza Csosz, a photographer, visual artist, moving-image artist, and researcher, the book introduces the Balloon Time Model: a conceptual framework in which the past is an irreversible string of actualised events, the future is a finite probabilistic volume, and the present is not a duration but a zero-thickness operation through which possibility becomes record.
At the centre of the study is Danger Soft Mud, a 365-day photographic and moving-image project made at Portishead Beach between 1 February 2025 and 31 January 2026. By returning to the same site every day, Csosz uses repetition, observation, weather, internal feedback, film, exhibition, and computational visualisation to examine how events pass from future possibility into recorded past while the present itself remains inaccessible.
Drawing on philosophy, photographic theory, moving-image practice, artistic research methodology, and formal modelling, this monograph argues that photography does not capture the present. It captures its disappearance. In doing so, the book proposes artistic practice as a rigorous method for thinking through temporality, finitude, evidence, and the limits of human experience.

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