meandering documentation

Description meandering

This work was done as an intermediate-diploma at the University of Arts, Berlin. The starting point was a research done on the beginning of photography and the reactions of the other arts, especially painting. I did a closer examination of so-called chronophotography and cubism in comparison, because these two directions both represent very different artistic and technological approaches to the visual representation of time. A short explanation of this thesis:

Photography succeeded relatively quickly in freezing increasingly short pictures of “the present” and film as a second (but far from inevitable) step set these images in motion again to create the illusion of movement on a screen.

Only a short time later, the cubists took excactly the opposite way by not displaying discrete portions of time, but many fragments of the duration (durée) of a 3dimensional visual impression of something. A painting by Braques or cubist works of Picasso are literally a modular, nearly virtual system of perspectives and points in time of looking at, for instance, a human face.

With this in mind, the project meandering tries to create an experimental synthesis of these directions by making use of current technology. Video images are used to be manipulated both spatially and temporally in a live 3d-environment.

While the video image is hovering in a black space, the actual films, which are approximately 10 seconds each, loop as textures on a single layer. You can pan, zoom and rotate around this layer. You can also manipulate the speed of the film, ranging from complete freeze to full speed motion.

When you click at some point on this layer and drag the mouse to the left or to the right, new layers are generated in front or in the back of the original layer.

The layers in front are showing the “future” of the original film, while the ones behind it are showing its “past” – you can see very well how an event literally travels through the film in this array. On the one hand, this creates an interesting tool for film analysis, but on the other hand it also gains sculptual character, as the number of layers and therefore complexity increases.

The four provided films are meant to be mere experiments with the aesthetics and implications of this software. Each film tries to show a different aspect of image and movement: the one with the woman on the staircase (a humble nod towards Duchamp) shows how a human figure gains a whole new physicalness, depending on perspective and shape of the objects in space. The tunnel-film explores the relation between past and present (light and darkness) within the loop, while the drop of water-film shows how a sudden event travels through the film-time until it reaches the “present”. The eye-film is relatively static but is interesting both as part of the human body and symbol for perception and creates pulsating surreal collages.

Actually, any video sequence could be loaded and viewed in meandering.

Stills meandering