Chronographs: still images of motion through time
Turbulent Sunset, LAX to PIT, Jan 07 2020.
Chronograph
Traditional slitscan photography uses a unique lens design that exposes film by sliding a tall thin opening across the negative rather than by exposing it all at once through a fixed aperture. Like digital scanners, this process captures a scene’s light over time and requires a moving iris. With the advent of digital video, this concept can be taken further and generate surprising visuals which exist somewhere between abstraction and representation. They feel both familiar and strange at the same time.
Digital video can be thought of as a cube of data. Each image is a two dimensional plane of pixels with X and Y coordinates, and these image planes captured over time are stacked on top of each other like the floors of a skyscraper. Using this analogy, a frame of video is the floor plan at a specific floor and what we think of as a slitscan would be a cross sectional slice of the whole height of the building. Ultimately, this cube of data can be processed, dissected, or remixed in arbitrary ways to the point where the name “slitscan” no longer makes sense. Video datagraphy is a more appropriate description of the process: making images from video data.
Freight Train, Pittsburgh. Jun 20 2019.
Chronograph
When we navigate the physical world, we use the stream of our moving and singular perspective to build a mental model representing what is around us beyond what we can directly experience at that moment. These models persist through time in our consciousness but we can never experience them holistically so we try to find patterns that can give us some reference as to where we are: a heart beat, light patterns, a mile marker, seasons, music… These linear signals inform our understanding of space beyond our current perspective and anchor us on the mysterious expanse of time.
Storytelling also spans time and space. It draws narrative vectors that connect specific coordinates in a system of places and moments, and it provides scaffolding on which our understanding of the world is hung. Even though stories are free from physical constraints and conjure a god-like perspective that we can never directly experience, they unfurl for us in a linear manner and give us glimpses of highers dimension, like shadows from a 4 dimensional object projected onto the 3 dimensions we inhabit.
The physical principles of traditional photography are similar to the way vision works in that they are limited to a single momentary perspective in space and time. Video datagrams look strange because of the way they expose the patterns time in a way that is not physically possible for us to directly experience but they feel familiar because we have already intuited what they end up revealing in a static coherent image.
