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…
This youtube video sent to us by Stuart Silverstone is impressive not just for its stretch of time, but style, medium and interpretation as well. Or as Stewart Brand said, this is an “amazing form of time travel…”
You can also see a complete list of artists and paintings here.
art:21, a recent PBS documentary series on contemporary art and artists, featured an episode on works dealing innovatively with time, which I saw on DVD over the weekend. Among those profiled was Paul Pfeiffer (born in Honolulu, 01966) a video artist who now lives and works in New York City.
His work entitled “Morning After the Deluge” (after a Turner painting) is a twenty-minute loop of a flawless Cape Cod sunrise and sunset, edited together such that the sun itself remains fixed centre-screen, while the horizon appears to move across it.
Image from carlier | gebauer
Pfeiffer makes some interesting remarks on the piece in a 02004 article entitled “The Sun is God“:
I shot Morning After The Deluge in real time. I was interested in the idea that the video loop represents a disturbing notion of time being something that you can actually freeze. When you look at the image you don’t see anything happening. The sun and the horizon don’t seem to move. You might think it’s a still unless you happen to look at it at a moment when a bird is flying by.
In the art:21 show (of which streaming video extracts are available online at PBS), he notes:
These days, it’s quite idealistic to think of the viewer as being anything but distracted, given the kind of image-saturated world that people function in.
In “Morning After the Deluge”, you have to be there at least for a few minutes, if not for the full twenty minutes, to see the full loop and to get the full sense of the sun rising and setting. In a way, it’s not very viewer-friendly. The shot is in real time, it almost looks like nothing’s happening, you really have to stand for a while to get the sense that the sun is slowly setting and rising. In the meantime, though, there’s a lot of other action that’s happening on a much smaller scale. You have birds flying very quickly through the screen. It’s almost at a pixel level, barely there at all — but projected big, this is something that you get to see. So this is maybe what you enter in on as a moving image, but as you sit with it for a while longer, then the bigger movements become accessible to you.
This makes for an interesting comparison to Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings, which was recently hosted by Long Now and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In a Wired interview from last week, Eno says:
It strikes me as one of the most interesting things about these shows is not one of the most immediately visible. One of the strangest experiences you’ll be having is an experience of time in a different way. You’ll see people rushing in off the street and they’re all busy and their body language is hectic — a “show me what’s happening” kind of language. And you watch them gradually settling down and start to slow down to the pace of the work, which is very slow. People seem really, really grateful for this possibility.
Pfeiffer challenges his distracted, image-saturated viewer to tune in to the real-time pace of a day beginning and ending, and Eno draws in crowds and keeps them for hours at a time with a mesmeric unfolding of practically endless visual (and musical) possibilities. Two very different approaches, but both are experiences intended to elicit and reward patient, sustained attention. This is an interesting development; perhaps part of a broader aesthetic backlash also including the Slow Food movement? For in the visual arts, a field of endeavour where it seems increasingly difficult to capture interest with conventional shock tactics, that which demands a certain kind of careful attention — which decelerates — may be some of the most daring artwork of all.
Making long-term thinking viable depends partly on rendering slow processes perceptible, compressing them onto a scale we can relate to more easily. Given that the quintessential long-now change processes (geology, deep culture etc) extend over many human lifetimes, a similar challenge is to make the passage of time more personal.
Here’s an addition to our Long Shorts gallery which does both of these things rather elegantly, using the simple but always interesting time-lapse approach. It’s a film by a New York-based photographer, Noah Kalina, who took a photo of himself every day for six years. The film, like the person, is a work in progress, as well as testimony to a formidable patience that evinces the kind of long-term thoughtfulness we’d like to see more often.
It also invites reflection on your own aging — for better or for worse…
Continuing our series of posts on “Long Shorts” (short movies that expand our notion of the future). I came across this series on the Discovery Channel. While over produced, dramatized, and sensational, this is the first of these types of programs that I can remember pushing out this far. It seems that back in the early to mid-part of the last century there was a lot of this type of future media (usually much more utopian), but as Danny Hillis’ pointed out that future got shorter and shorter as we approached the end of a century and a millennium…
note: At 39 minutes into the City episode, there is a brief section on digital preservation and holographic storage which reminds me of our Rosetta Project.
Submitted by Dan Mosedale this animated map/timeline of the last 5000 years of religion is really fantastic. Also another take on that was submitted by Kevin Kelly. I also just came across this great Historical Atlas page.
As part of the series of “Long Shorts” (videos, generally short ones, that exemplify long term thinking or longer perspective).
This was a brilliant X Box commercial that was pulled off the air… really great.
As part of the series of “Long Shorts” (videos, generally short ones, that exemplify long term thinking or longer perspective).
Of all the great time lapses done in film, some of the very best belong to Baraka. Visually stunning, with an equally increadible sound track, this movie is really the most amazing in the wordless visual genre.
As part of the series of “Long Shorts” (videos, generally short ones, that exemplify long term thinking or longer perspective).
This German made Academy Award winning short is one of my absolute favorites in the Long Short category.
Someday in the future our trouble with our current systems of networking and wireless and routers and protocols and software will seem as charming and obvious as… well as charmingly obvious as the hassles medieval monks may have had with the first books, if you can believe this cool video. It’s a glorious send-up about medieval tech support — in part a spoof on tech support of all kinds, and in part a jab at technology which depends so much on tech support. Very funny and worth a minute of your time. It’s origins are explained here, where you can also find the video:
A comedy about medieval tech support, learning how to use a book. It’s from a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian, the subs in Danish. It’s written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad.
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