I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.
This wonderful video posted online last week by New York-based performance art collective Improv Everywhere showcases their latest project, “Frozen Grand Central”, which mischievously targeted victims of the Big Apple’s notoriously short now.
At first I wondered whether this had anything to do with the campaign by Adbusters Media Foundation, a Vancouver-based activist network, to promote a Slow Down Week in the middle of last month (13-19 January 02008).
Apparently not.
Now, I love the idea of staging performance art simply to cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, as Improv Everywhere’s website has it, but Adbusters really could have used this kind of boost to its cause. (At the time of writing, googling the phrase “Slow down week” yields 7,050 hits; “Frozen grand central” gets 22,900.) Personally, I clean forgot about Slow Down week for the duration. It was the start of semester and one of my busiest weeks in the past year. Oops.
Stills from Feed (blog) at Stash (DVD Magazine) online.
Herewith, an elegant “long short” featuring the formation of an island from scratch, from the stirring of an underwater volcano to lush tropical paradise in less than sixty seconds. Okay, so it’s a beer ad — we’ll rip off long shorts wherever we find ‘em.
A lifelog, or lifeblog, is an attempt to fully document every second, every action, every interaction, every keystroke, every conversation of one’s life. In this sense it is quantitative as it accumulates data about a person’s daily activities. But among lifeloggers there is a subgroup of photo lifeloggers who are merely content to photographicly record their life in detail. There are many photologgers who take a portrait of themselves everyday.
One of the longest running of these daily guys, JK, now has a daily 8-year series of himself. He recently turned that series into a wonderful and mesmerizing timelapse animation.
This fellow JK also maintains a list of other maniacal photologgers here. Daily portraits seem to be a big thing in Germany. Some like to keep the photo constant from day to day in an almost clinical uniformity. Others are committed to dressing themselves up to maximize diversity from day to day. But the obsessive nature needed to maintain anything daily for years shows up in a few really obsessive photologgers. One guy takes a picture of whatever is in his right hand for the first time that day. Here is an excerpt from part of his day on December 6, 2007.
It’s an odd collection only because its trouble to take it. Someday when cameras will film our lives 24/7, this degree of documentation won’t be freakish.
The job of the long view is to penetrate illusion. […] How can we see the insidious transformations of our own day? Slow science is part of it, applied history is part of it, and every year there are more sophisticated tools of macroscopic vision. One video going the rounds of the conferences shows the accelerating growth of human population on a world map; the sudden overwhelm in the last seconds makes audiences gasp in shock.
Despite some pretty clunky animation, by present standards, this 01990 version of the World Population video packs the visceral punch, the acceleration shock of a compressed long view.
A few notes:
(a) This version is from a TV broadcast and is bookended by talking heads; you can skip to the main event which runs 0:45 through 3:35.
(b) It’s produced by Population Connection, an advocacy organisation formerly called Zero Population Growth. In aid of driving home the point, it (perhaps unnecessarily) includes projected figures in the same breath as historical ones, which muddies things somewhat. A bit more about the video can be found on p. 18 of this pdf report.
(c) A more recent version, updated 02000 — but longer and no more compelling — can be found here. The main segment there runs from 1:40 through 6:00.
But what do we get out of this type of video visualisation? Gleick’s remarks on the ubiquitous curve of exponential increase may point us in the right direction…
You have seen [this] graph. You have seen it more than once. It depicts the long-threatened population explosion, or some kind of population explosion, plotted over a few centuries, or millennia, or any time scale at all. It represents the growth in computer ownership over the last two decades. The number of commercial Internet hosts rising over a mere four years. Software patents granted from 1971 to the present. Chest-pain emergency departments in the 1990s. Millions of instructions per second carried out by a matchbook-sized computer. Potential sexual partners. Mustards. Published words. Four-minute milers. Everything, it seems, that grows out of the interaction between human beings. The amount of stuff we do, divided by the amount of time available. […] If a graph can be a cliché, the graph for exponential growth has become a cliché.
So, the main offer of a video such as this, is seems to me, lies not in its details so much as its broad approach to making the familiar strange — our unprecedented 6.5 billion population, for instance. In short, it makes the cliché of accelerating change shocking again.
Paolo Savagione (lead engineer on our Clock Project) sent in this nifty video of a 1000 year forestry-clock idea in France. We have talked about ideas like this for the 10,000 Year Clock, but this is the first simulation of such an idea I have seen. I think however that there might be more successful ways to use this idea that would be as interesting in the moment as they would be in time lapse.
This 10 second time lapse compresses 35 years of skyscraper construction in Shinjuku district of Tokyo. It’s worth watching several times. Watch on YouTube or click here:
This time lapse video of flight patterns as they unfold over the course of a day over North America is one of my favorite pieces of data-crunched-into-video-art. I especially like how you can see the morning flights wash through the time zones.
In the 15.08 issue of Wired is an interesting story on photographer David Michalek who seems to have pushed the tech of hi res - hi frame count film equipment to a new level, in ordeer to create is most recent piece of dancers in ultra slow motion. I always find it ironic that the slower you want something to appear in film, the faster you have to shoot it…
