Duration

Tim Macmillan is a photographer and videographer who pioneered the “Time Slice” effect while at University in the 1980’s. He designed his own equipment and process to capture his imagery.

Macmillan’s specialised equipment is effectively a large metal ring, containing from hundreds of cameras, each of which create stills on 16mm film. The film is exposed by a flash of light, which causes the film to expose in a fraction of a second. This is then played as a film, creating motion as the cameras “move” around the subject, the “time” is actually happening all at once. This is of interest to me as it illustrates how time and space can be percieved differently from our usual interpretation, we are used to seeing time in film progress in a linear motion, however, here time is frozen while we explore space.

Macmillan’s work is effective because it is both visually appealing and effective in it’s use of both space and time. Conceptually it forces us to view events differently, while we recognise it, as it is such an unusual and unique technique.

Etienne Marey was a French scientist working in the late nineteenth century, he was a pioneer of both cineam and photography. His work looks at human movement using photography to capture and display the actions. His photography was created using a specially created “gun”, which captured 12 frames a second, all exposed onto the same image, allowing him to study movement. Later he developed a cinematic technique which captured movement at 60 frames a second.

Marey’s technique allowed the analysis of movement through the use of imagery, we can things that the eye cannot and study them in detail through the use of his work. The images lie in field where art and science cross over, which is something that interests me throughout my work. While the images are not designed to be aesthetic in an artistic sense, there is something about them which draws our interest, perhaps in the graphical way in which realistic people and animals are presented.

David Claerbout is a Belgian artist who works with both photography and video, I am especially interested in the way which his work confronts the boundary between photography and video. He does this by exploiting cinematic projects of photographs, as well as photographic presentations of cinema, such as large format grids of video, used to moving narratives. He also presents his work in a large format, as projections in a white space, he wishes to make the museum experience different to that of the cinema.

Claerbout realises that the language of his work is cinematic, but feels the museum or gallery space is a way to represent this, giving the audience more freedom to move through his work, making it more personal and less controlled than sitting in a cinema. He tries to move away from the cinema experience by new ways of installing work. Firstly his work is installed in a white rather than dark black space, secondly it is projected onto walls rather than a screen and thirdly, more than one piece can be viewed at once. This makes the experience much different to watching a film. Another interesting technique is the use of transparent screens – this makes the work partly visible, but also fall off into the space, hitting the walls and people moving through the gallery, making the whole space become part of the work, rather than just the projections.

Claerbout also presents still image as a projcetion, blurring the line between the two formats, the photograph allows the viewer time to contemplate the image, while video progresses in a linear fashion, however, when the line is blurred like this can we define which catergory the work is truly in? Another way in which this is challenged is through the use of short, looped material, which can be defined as neither a still image, nor a cinematic film – which relys on narrative.

Damian Sutton discusses Claerbouts work, his analysis shows how an image can collapse time, as well as how the different medias can work together as described by the intermediality lecure I studied earlier, and how new technologies allow this more readily;

In Claerbout’s video overlays, the “superimposed time codes”
emphasize the gap that we appreciate between past and future, but it
takes Claerbout rending them apart to reveal how photography naturally
crashes past and future together. New technologies always have
the capacity to reveal the unspoken characteristics of old ones.

The Crystal Image of Time (p225)

Gerhard Richter is a German artist and most prominently a painter, while he has also produced photorealistic paintings, and photographs which appear painterly or have been altered with paint. Again, this is an artist whose work links to the intermediatlity concept running through my work currently.

Richter’s photographic work relies on it’s technique to demostrate an improvised “blur”. Firstly the artist takes a photograph of his subject, he then projects this image onto his canvas and traces it for a painting. After the image has been painted, a squeegee is used to drag the wet paint across the surface of the image, ‘blurring’ the result. While this may have underlying concepts of identity I am more interested in the crossover between the two artforms, and the way in which a false perception of movement is produced.

Sometimes the effect is subtle, while in other images it becomes much more abstract and noticable. In these more abstract works we are forced to view a realistic photographic work of a city or other landscape as a series of smears and lines, with a large pallet of colours similar to that presented in the original image. While it may not be a direct copy of the original, neither was the photograph which the painting was based on, it was merely a copy, and in these pieces, we see a copy of the copy produced and manipulated, questioning the originals reality and our perception of the space.

John Hilliard is an English artist who uses photography in his work, which mostly challenges the concept of photography itself. He does this by exploiting things which are specific to the medium such as shutter speed and exposure in order to challenge its truth. By creating multiple versions of the same image, Hilliard proves that photography must be subjective, not objective, as it’s process is defined by controls which, when changed, result in variations in the image which would not allow for a single, ‘true’ version of the photograph.

I am interested in Hilliard’s work because of his work related to time, showing that the camera is not able to present us with, as many describe “an instant” but a discrete measurable moment.

In this image we see how the state of water cannot be objectively defined with the use of the camera. By using two different shutter speeds the camera is capable of rendering the water in two different ways, this leads us to question which one, if either, is the more accurate representation. The image also shows us the technical capabilities of the camera, and its possible applications in relation to time and movement.

Dryden Goodwin is an English artist, mostly known for his series of portraits overlaying drawing with photography. Here I have selected one of his lesser known works, which formed part of a 1999 exhibition at the Site Gallery, Traffic. The piece presents us with a series of film stills, displayed as small transparencies on a light box. The piece builds up its power through the repetition of the cars, through the number used, almost referencing a typology, the work is built up. The way in which the moving image becomes the still, yet still, through its presentation references the cinema again, in a loop of moving/still. This is then repeated in the subject matter, which presents us with a moving subject, frozen still in each frame.

Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. Cinemagraphs, which are usually published in an animated GIF format, can give the illusion that the viewer is watching a video

Wikipedia

Here are some examples;

As seen in the images, still and moving images are combined to make a short loop which contains elements of both. These can be used to either disturb or surprise the viewer, as movement is not expected. The unique look of the cinemagraph is interesting and something we do not see very often – it is yet another example of how technology can help us combine media.

This film was made in 1982 by Godfrey Reggio. It is made up of slow motion video and time lapse clips of various landscapes, moving into the city and examining its movement. Yet again, this is a piece which contrasts the still and moving image in order to get us to re-evaluate time. Especially relevant in this video is our use of technology and it’s advancement in time, with us moving away from nature as technolgy gains momentum. The video excludes narrative or spoken words, using only images and music to convey its message, perhaps a symbol of the limitations of our language. The video shows us the way in which we have advanced, without directly telling us through language. Rather than showing us the effect technology has on us, the director shows us technology itself, without people, to show us the power it has over our whole world. The cars reference our own movement, while the way the city is presented references the way in which silicon chips look. The author did not want to load the title with preconceptions, so titled the image with a word which had no cultural meaning, as he felt language was too limited to describe the meaning of the film. The actual title means out of “A way of life which is in turmoil”.

Paul Gorman is an upcoming British photographer who recently graduated from Bournemouth University. Since graduating Gorman has featured in a number of group shows around the country and his work is beginning to gain momentum. His work explores space and time through the use of multiple exposures, which enables him to view an object or scene from more than one perspective at the same time, at different times, in one image. This is somewhat similar to cubism, which attempted to represent three-dimensional space in paintings.

In the above image for example, we see both a long and a wide shot of the same (presumably) trees, allowing us to see two different viewpoints at one time. Rather than us reading this however as two seperate images, we see the new image as a whole, the two views merging into one single piece which becomes a new form of time and space which is only visible through the use of the camera.

This is relevant to my own work because of its use of time and space. It is interesting to see time collapsed down into a single still frame in this way, while the camera’s fixed perspective is denied as multiple ways of looking are composed on top of each other.

Dr. Edgerton worked as both an artist and a scientist, looking at ways in which the camera could freeze motion, much like Muybridge and Marey before him. There are several strands to his work, including studies of movement, high speed images and military work for the US governments nuclear weapons program. His work centers around the use of flash photography using an electric arc to create a momentary flash much shorter than conventional flashes of the time and even today. This is an example of technology enabling a particular way of seeing – without the stroboscope, even the camera could not see these images.

This example shows how a fast movement can be captured, this image uses an effective shutter speed of around 1/1,000,000 second, much faster than a regular camera’s maximum 1/1000 or a modern flash’s 1/20,000. When working with such high speeds we have to question everything we know about photography’s ability to freeze time, what we see as time, even in the fastest conventional images, is slow by a huge degree when compared to Edgertons’ imagery. If such a process existed that could show us time more finely than even Edgerton, and demonstrate the differences in the world that exist at these speeds, would we be able to appreciate time in the same way? From this we can explain that time is NOT a series of discreet events as we see in film and photography, but actually an infinitely moving and linear concept which cannot be described as a single moment, because the moment itself can be infinitely small.

Muybridge was an English photographer whose work was pioneering in the field of movement.

His work studied the movement of people and animals, going as far as to reconstruct this movement in a device which he called the zooproxiscope, which projected still images from a spinning glass disc to create an illusion of movement. What is interesting is how aware the early practioners were that thier constructs of movement were just that, constructs or recreations, rather than the actual movement itself. The images and the accompanying projections are not just artistic work, but also scientifically show the movement of various species, and area which could not be studied without the equipment used by Muybridge. Particulary of interest to me is the way moving animal is processed into still images, which are assembled into something resembling a circular filmstrip or loop, which then presents us with moving images once again.

Tacita Dean is a British artist who works primarily with film. She sees film as an important medium in the way it has a tangability and interaction with time. Her work questions the act of looking, and whether there is honesty in what we can see. She works on her projects by learning from her results and developing what she sees in the work. Her work is very still, showing slow, delicate movements and very graphic views. The sea and seascapes feature heavily in her work, as a vast expanse of space which confronts the viewer in an epic way.

I have chosen to look at this image, not because of the artist, but the way in which it exhibits focal plane distortion, a related topic to slit scan photography. Because the shutter of the camera moved at a high speed, it was beginning to close before it was fully open, as it moved across the image the car moved past the camera, causing it to lean, while it was panned to follow the car (albeit more slowly than the car was moving) causing the crowd to lean in the opposite direction. Notice that the wheels are not recorded as circular, but ovals, due to them moving as the focal plane moves upwards.

Daniel Crooks is an artist who works with the slit scan technique. He uses it to distort and alter what we see in the real world with some good results, which he presents as series of videos, accompanied by stills.

In this video, crooks uses his technique to create the illusion that the waves are flowing across the beach rather than towards us. This is an interesting effect which works aesthetically, however I am unsure of the motivation behind the piece. There is also noticeable distortion where the effect has taken place on low resolution footage, leaving a visible trace of where the video was edited, I doubt this was intended although it could be said to show evidence of the technique, almost like a painters brush strokes.

This example is much cleaner and more polished, the object is most likely flowers but it could be many things. Turning the object on a turntable, Crooks keeps us from ever seeing what it looks like, using time to paint a new object entirely. The movement is very subtle, making it appear almost like a still. The slowness and silence of the video, along with the lack of colour, make it much more contemplative than the other work, however, as an abstract piece I see it as not much other than form and tone, as there is not subtext given to the work or any signifiers within it.

Mittelstaedt uses slitscan photography to record a trace of his subject, when she moves her movement is recorded as a series of lines travelling across the image, a ghosting of her movement. This piece is quite effective visually, with good technical qualities and the movement and its recording become quite striking. The video is about the human body and its form, especially the way in which form can change, alter and move. The technique is used quite litterally to explore the movement of the body, much like the historic artists I have looked at, Mittelstaedt is recording movement itself in order to present us with a trace of where the body once was, this is refelected in the title, Unfolding as the movement of the model “unfolds” into a new form of the slitscan, where her body is warped into two dimensions, as if her skin has been unwrapped and presented as a flat object.

In Mobile Brush Lam experiments with technology to “draw” an image from a video input. He explains how his softwares funciton in his video, which he says is a mobile phone application. Lam seems more interested in the interaction of the medium of technology and the world than the imagery itself. The use of technology is something which is key to my works production, but I do not know yet whether I consider it to be a mere tool, or an vital part of the work itself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PR1kjhzANQ

Knapek creates imagery based on time, which he has been delveloping for some time. It is vaguely based on slit-scan photography, although he writes as though he is unaware of the technique. His basic work comprises of time lapse images shown as one single image, allowing us to see multiple moments in time, all in one instant.

In his early work, we see a few hours presented as one image, we see the sun and moon streak across the sky. The difference between this type of image and a slow shutter speed is that everything is exposed correctly and rendered sharply across the frame, rather than being blurred and having extremities of light and dark. What is most interesting is the movement of the sun.

When he developed his technique further, Knapek was able to produce an image of an entire 24 hours, from midnight to midnight, showing a transition from night to day in a single frame. It is strange how there is little twilight shown to us. Conceptually the work begins to be underpinned by titles, such as “Second shortest day” showing that the work is about time and the sun, rather than merely an interesting technique.

This piece documents a train journey, each veritcle line is from a different photograph, which is compressed horizontally to allow us to view all the images in a smaller, panoramic space. The image becomes a trace of the journey, an image of space and time, and how the artist travelled through it.

Finally I wanted to look at this piece of work, which isn’t actually photographic, instead it is a technological trace of the sun. Each dot is representative of the strenght of the sun at a certain time and date, with dates horizontally and time vertically. It is interesting to see how Knapek’s work has developed from his early experiments into this, quite advanced, and technically driven, trace of the Sun.

Woodman was a young photographer, artist and student, who made most of her work in the 1970’s before her suicide at the age of 22. I wanted to look at her work because of the way in which she takes advantage of the camera and its recording method.
The slow shutter allows the artist to blur her subjects together, merging and amalgamting them together. Young girls (usually Woodman herself) morph into the decaying architecture, becoming part of it, fading away into brick and peeling wallpaper. In this particular image Woodman has been very succesful in getting the image balanced, it is aesthetically a strong image, with a deep and dark background to it. The image can be seen as a metaphor for the darkness of adolescence and the worries of teenage life – which eventually resulted in Woodman’s own death. It is also a reminder of mortality, as the building decays, so does the young female model, she is not able to escape the effects of time.

http://vimeo.com/42460300
I looked into La Jetee because it succeeds in creating a film almost entirely from stills. There is also narration added to the film which was obviously not part of the original recording. This meeting of mediums appears seemless, with the audience not jarred or disorientated by its format, instead they become enveloped in the narrative, which is an interesting story concerning time travel, memory and death. The narrator is trapped in his own dreams, forever seeking something, but his memory fails him every time he reaches towards it, only at the end of the film do we realise the event is his own death. The film could be read as a message not to seek in life, as it is futile, death will always catch up with us. By using the stills rather than traditional video, the message of the film is read somewhat more seriously, and becomes more effective, yet just as engrossing as film.

Carter is an English photographer and artist whose work is centered around the concept of painting with light. He often creates very graphic imagery, yet through photographic means. He achieves his images using a special camera which has a swing lens – normally used to create a panorama. By swinging this lens across the image while simultaneously swinging the camera in the opposite direction streaks can be made to appear in the image, and details stretched. His images show how the camera can be used, quite simply, to distort our world rather than recreate it realistically. This also shows the failure of the camera as an instrument of objectivity – these images all fail to reproduce what our eyes see.

Each image is a one off produced on 120 film with a widelux camera, rather than digital image manipulation, this adds value to the image both conceptually and in monetry value – they are not easy to produce and there is an element of chance and certainly failure. The images are a direct record of the technology (the camera) and the user (the photographer) interacting to record the subject and thus are a trace of the movement of both during the duration of the exposure.

I have looked at the work of Sugimoto before but wanted to draw upon this series, which is taken inside a cinema. I like the work becuase it draws upon both the still and moving image, and uses one to capture the other. I think this is a great way to interact with the medium itself, which is something that has interested me for a long time – photography which explores photography. I am not going to go into depth with analysis of this image, but there are some great commantaries written in both The Crystal Image of Time and Stillness and Time

A Solargraph is a photograph which is taken on a very long exposure, generally in a pinhole camera. The result is that the image takes on the surroundings, but the sun streaks across the sky multiple different times – showing a trace of its path. The resulting image is then fixed but not developed – as it is already well developed from the extreme amounts of light it has recieved. The process is often carried out over six months to a year and sits somewhere between art and science, while it might not be directly related to my project, I feel it is a key area of photography related to time and duration, and wanted to mention it here – it is unusual to see a photograph which shows us a period so long.

Here is some of the code that I had to use to process the videos into stills, scan them, and then convert them back into video again. I think that the code itself has a part in my work, and I am considering it being part of the work itself, showing directly how technology interacts with the world in which we live, or at very least that algorithms can be a functioning part of an art piece.


import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Frame;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;
import java.awt.event.FocusEvent;
import java.awt.Image;
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.zip.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

void draw() {
background(0xffE0E4CC);
if (background == null) {
displayExplanation();
} else {
background.update();
}
displayControls();
}