AMP

Hard at work here at Camp MacDowell. When I haven’t been making huge blueprints I’ve been creating some experimental projection pieces in which videos are projected onto photographs. The photographs they are projected onto are created by projecting the video onto light-sensitive paper (read: long exposure). There is a certain kind of beauty in both the redundancy of the image/video and the temporal confusion by layering ongoing moments on top of still images. Watch examples below:

Here’s my thesis: The sneeze is the closest bodily function we have to the process of photography–or rather, the sneeze is the closest thing we have similar to photographic time in nature. It reflexively slices time up, obscures vision, and for nearly 1/3 of the population, can be triggered by light. I see the act of photography as split-second of momentary blindness–a reactionary interruption that obstructs our seeing. However, while we photograph to preserve, we sneeze to expel, to rid our body of foreign particles, usually dust or other small particulate matter. By expelling the dust, we are preserving our body, our health, and our well-being.

I’ve always found this sequence by Edison to be an interesting documentation of a sneeze:

Even more so interesting knowing that he photographed with a contraption like this:

I made my own interpretation, albeit these are stills from a video camera:

Still, my favorite sneeze photographs are the ones where the sneezer expels a universe of stars into a boogery atmosphere:

Just bought a globe. This passage was in the manual:

Only at the stroke of midnight on the international date line is a day the same all over the world. A moment later, there are two days going on at the same time. When Tuesday has arrived at the international date line, it is still Monday over the rest of the world. The new day moves westward.
When a day is six hours old, it has traveled one-quarter of the way around the world. Then one-quarter of the world is having Tuesday and the other three-quarters are having Monday. Six hours later, the new day is half way around the world and in another six hours, three-quarters of the way. Finally, it approaches the date line again and another new day, Wednesday, is born.

It makes my head hurt when I think about stuff like this.

I did it. I’m not proud of it, but I did it.

I miss you MN.

I managed to get ahold of a pair of tickets to see ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’ at the Walker Art Center this past weekend. For those who haven’t heard about this movie, it’s a film about the French football (read: soccer) star who became even more famous for headbutting the Italian Materazzi in last year’s World Cup. Part documentary, part art-film, the movie is best described by it’s process: “The film was made by training 17 cameras, under the supervision of acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji, solely on footballer Zinédine Zidane over the course of a single match between Real Madrid and Villareal. ” (Taken from the official website). So what you watch is an entire football match in real-time, except the cameras don’t follow the ball–rather, they remain locked on Zidane for the entire length of the film. This means lots of sweaty closeups, shots of just his cleats, hands, etc. It also results in a very unique portrait of popular athlete. The combination of close-ups, grainy film, and closely mic’d audio makes the entire experience very intense. I prepared myself for boredom, but actually felt many of the same emotions one goes through in viewing an action film. There are two things I wanted to highlight, however:

1. The break between halves. I still don’t know how I feel about this. After the first half of the game, the film goes into a totally different direction, giving us glimpses of things that are occurring around the world at the same time the soccer match is taking place. While I understand the creator’s purpose of trying to drive home the point that a soccer game is a moment just like any other moment, and our society’s need for spectacle allows the match to last whereas (depending on who you ask) more important moments are forgotten. However, the last shot in the montage is taken from news footage of a car-bomb in Iraq. One of the bystanders near the wreckage is wearing a Zidane jersey–while this moment is really quite nice, I don’t know if it’s worth disrupting the otherwise mesmorising flow of the rest of the film. Perhaps they should have kept that moment to themselves.

2. I didn’t pick up on this at first, but Alyson (my wonderful partner who saw the film with me), noticed how going into a theater to see 92 minutes of ‘real-time’ (in which each minute portrayed onscreed is also an actual minute in the world) had such a strong effect on our own perception of time. We went into the theater around 6 and left about 100 minutes later, yet it felt as if it were midnight. Compare this to seeing any other movie in which several hours, days, and weeks are squeezed into a 90 minute film. In my experience, I leave the theater exactly as I expect–slightly energized, and feeling like I just spent an hour or so in a darkened theater. Zidane’s effect was quite jolting, and I’m trying to pin it down on whether or not it was the result of watching something real-time in a theater–anyone else have similar experiences?