Perpendicular Time

Why I keep going back to making these kinds of images.

Over the past few years, I’ve been developing techniques for generating still images from digital video data. The name I have for one of these techniques is “time collapse”. Originally, I meant it as a pun that came from the fact that I started experimenting with this approach by collapsing the individual frames of a time lapse movie into a single image. Ultimately, the description seems appropriate in more meaningful ways because the outcome of the process generates a strange feeling of looking into something outside of time.

The resolution will not be digitized.

Consider the fact that the distance of a simple step you take can always be cut in half, and that the resulting halves can further be infinitely divided. If that’s the case, how is it possible that we can ever get anywhere since it requires us to cross this infinity? And yet, we do… As the resolution of digital cameras continues to increase, it further subdivides but it never seems to reach the kind of definitive resolution that occurs with the simple and paradoxical completion of the actual physical foot step.

Does counting molecules in a volume of water tell you more about it than floating in it?

The devil is in the details.

… but not in the way we think. Details distract and obfuscate. Unpolished, the roughness of a stone’s surface reflects light and creates an opaque shell. Once it is polished, light can penetrate that surface and reveal an interior structure whose patterns intuitively hint at universal processes and a common ancestry lost in time. This is the payoff. There is an old trick in image making called “the squint test”: squinting blurs your vision and lets you evaluate the core of the image without being distracted by the busyness of all the details. Time collapse images similarly average out the high frequency temporal changes and let us glimpse at what is constant.

Let it breathe so that it might live.

The process of making time collapse images restores an important aspect of pre-digital photography which consisted of two separate steps: capturing data and processing it. Since there is no way to evaluate the final outcome of the second step at the time we are involved in the first, we have to learn, observe the world, refine our discernment and hone our craft with the hopes that the universe might pollinate our hunches and transform them into results we could not have willed into existence. The process requires a surrender and uncertainty, but the unexpected outcomes end up being more satisfying because they confirm that we are part of something bigger than our egocentric selves. We channel and reveal what is already there.

Why this now?

Modern life feels out of control, and maybe it is because “life”, in fact, always has been and always will be that way. I’m not a Luddite and it would be disingenuous of me to dismiss the creative potential of digital tools but I never have been able to shake the feeling that we lose a lot to the instantaneous immateriality of the medium. I’m both fascinated and suspicious.

From the beginning, the creative promises of digital tools have revolved around providing the power and control to be more productive and generate more accomplished looking results in less time. From what I’ve experienced in the past 30 years though, the truth is that it never quite seems to be enough and there’s always something better just around the corner. Digital technology has not made life simpler or more pleasant. It imposes an electronic grid which quantizes and isolates. It is antithetical to organic connectivity. Anxiety is not a bug, it’s a feature of digitally enhanced predatory capitalism; we have unwittingly become the product rather than the client.

Time collapse is a breath of air for my overstimulated brain. It’s made of light, wind and water, and it is wedged at an angle perpendicular to the curve that maps the exponentially accelerating clicks of humanity’s metronome.