Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [DAY/NIGHT] (Short Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 25 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [THE FOUR SEASONS] (Medium Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 27 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [INFINITY CYCLE] (Long Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 25 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T-S], 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 14 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [ALLEGRO] (Short Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 0 min, 25 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [MODERATO] (Medium Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 1 min, 52 sec.
Emma Johnson, The Cherry Blossom Cycle [LARGO] (Long Durée), 2026. Digital Video, 7 min, 4 sec.
The Cherry Blossom Cycle is a series of stop animations made with digital video using LEGOs and watercolor to create the images. The cycles refer to Braudel’s short, medium, and long durées of history.
There are three videos for the three cycles that reference Breudel's durées of history. One tree goes through the cycle of day to night, a short durée. Another tree goes through the cycle of the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, the medium durée. And the third tree goes through a cycle that is unintelligible to the viewer that it is even a cycle. I call it the infinity cycle. It's Breudel's longest durée, which can span centuries or millennia. This idea of a long duration as a part of what are seen as events was also explored by historian Charles Tilly, whose bookThe Contentious French: Four centuries of popular struggle (1986), explores how phenomena seen as non-events are consequential parts that lead to what is viewed as an event. Three additional videos explore the same event and time sequence but experience time differently, in three tempos. While the films are silent, the Italian words reference the same sheet music experienced at different speeds depending on the composer’s directions. Another video skips ahead and presents information in quick bursts. Often life and history is understood this way: in fragments.
For the cherry blossom animations, every time the camera clicks, it freezes a moment in time. But the viewer knows that it is our eye that makes these little events into a cohesive narrative by the perpetual motion that our eyes assemble to make sense of what we see. The famous 1878 “The Horse in Motion” photography experiment by Eadweard Muybridge showed that the world works not always as it appears to us. That is, the horses hooves moved inward in the air rather than out as previously assumed.
Additionally, besides the outward event of a cherry blossom falling, the viewer knows that the tree is going through internal changes that we cannot see; and its environment, including the seasons, contributes to its being and changing.
While there are economic cycles, there are also cycles of the seasons. As Breudel relates trading cycles to the climate of the Mediterranean, I relate the The trees gain and lose their cherry blossoms as the seasons change. While technically everything is nature, people often think of the economy abstracted by the stock market numbers and a walk in the woods as separate, even though their names come from the same Greek root word eco (oikos), which means house (an environment of sorts), household, or home. This phenomena of nature (physis) and technology (techne) being inextricably linked French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy terms “ecotechnics.”
This way of viewing the world relates to the idea of home and the housing bubble that led to the 2008 Recession. Additionally, Canadian philosopher John Russon writes about the home being a boundary between safety and an unpredictable exterior outside world. However, the housing crisis made the boundaries collapse where what was supposed to be a warm and safe space was actually an asset influenced by exterior forces that created instability in what was thought to be stable.
Finally, the LEGO trees juxtapose “real” nature versus the artificiality in the plastic that represents something organic. The bright colors of the LEGOs make nature hyperreal. I both shot the frames using a Leica and used a shallow depth of field to give the films a dream-like quality. I used watercolor for the backgrounds to include a human touch and to add whimsy to the images. The human touch invites the viewer to contemplate the human role in creating historical narratives that guide our actions in the present.
Works referenced
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
Coppola, Sofia, dir. 2003. Lost in Translation. United States: Focus Features.
“Eco-.” Merriam Webster. Accessed August 13, 2026. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eco-
Muybridge, Eadweard. The Horse in Motion. 1878. Collotype, dimensions vary. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
For the idea of home, see: Russon, John. “Home.” In Sites of Exposure: Art, politics, and the nature of experience. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017, p. 35-60.
For the idea that nature and technology are inseparable, see: Nancy, Jean-Luc. “From Ontology to Technology.” In The Fragile Skin of the World. New York: Polity, 2019/2021.
Tilly, Charles. 1986. The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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