(Receipt image generator day in the life of.zip)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been aware of a strange transaction at the core of our everyday lives.
We exchange our time for money, and then we exchange that money for goods and or services / experiences.
In return, we’re handed a receipt: a small, disposable piece of paper that somehow contains the entire value of that interaction.

A receipt is proof of where you were, what you chose, and how much of your time was converted into money and then into something else.
This tiny artefact quietly links your labour to your lived experience, printed in black and white.

And eventually the question appeared:

Where does the real value live?
In the work?
In the money?
In the object?
Or in the receipt that remembers it?

Every day, we produce another kind of receipt: one we rarely think of this way.
It happens when we take photos, record videos, and capture fragments of our days:
think of the photos you have on you phone of a coffee, the train ride, a sunset, a moment of joy or boredom.
These images are digital, weightless, and just as disposable.
They degrade, they compress, and they drift into cloud servers until we forget they exist (while we remain paying for thier GB’s of useless storage)

Yet they are still receipts of time spent. these are little markers of where we were, what we felt, and what we noticed: Is this not Our lives?

This project, A Day in the Life Of…, is an attempt to give those “receipts of life” a physical form again.
But only for a moment.
The technology behind a thermal receipt is itself unstable: fading in sunlight, sensitive to heat, destined to disappear. It is the reverse of a Polaroid:
instead of slowly appearing, it slowly disappears, returning to white over months.

Using a simple POS thermal printer, the kind found in supermarkets, cafés, shops the project compiles every photo and video from a single day.
It arranges them chronologically, from the first moment after waking to the last moment before sleep.
It prints them as one long, continuous strip: an inventory of a day lived.

Some days stretch long and busy; others are short and almost empty.
Some read as coherent narratives; others feel chaotic, fragmented, or surreal.
But together, they form a visual account; a daily audit of memory.

These receipt-strips hang freely in space, like memories drifting from short-term toward long-term storage.
They become physical records of digital moments, frozen for an instant before they would otherwise disappear into device clutter, algorithmic compression, or the general noise of life.

In a world where capitalism teaches us to consume, discard, and move on, this project slows everything down.
It invites you to look closely at the disposable fragments of your own life—to see what remains, what repeats, what matters, and what is forgotten.

Last exhibited:
Amsterdam Studio Westland, 2025

We are all constantly processing our own days.
We are all collecting evidence of who we were, even if we rarely ask why.

These strips are my attempt to turn that invisible process into something you can hold, examine, question.

How did you really spend your time?

One day, I’d love to build a phone app that automatically grabs a screenshot every ten seconds while I’m using it. This is because there are nights when I reach the end of a doom-scroll and wonder:
Why did I stay up so late? What did I actually look at? Where did the hours go?
It always feels like a void.
Perhaps that will become another project. But onyl when my app-building skills catch up.