Bragaglia's translated piece about Photodynamism is interesting because of the "trash" potential of those pictures that we take and then delete because they are not focused. They are not sharp. They don't capture a perfect image. I think in this day and age when Autofocus technology is so precise there is something infuriating about producing a picture that's less than crystal-clear perfection.
But it happens all of the time, especially now when everyone is always carrying a camera in their back pocket.
Bragaglia says that "In this way light and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Phtodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions ... Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired synthesis" (29).
What he says here often happens accidentally, but it can also happen quite deliberately in several ways. The instructions, then, are multi-parted.
Instruction 1: Put your camera's setting on the long-exposure (these are usually night-time settings, utilized in very very very steady mode that consists of multiple rapid-fire shots that layer on top of each other so that whatever light that's captured is multiplied onto the same image. Anther way that this works is that the shutter doesn't close, and thus attempt to capture, for as long as possible, the light. This is how people take pictures of the Milky Way). Now, not all cameras have a long-exposure setting, so I would read the instruction manual or Google your camera's ID number to check. What happens if you don't keep your camera steady (usually by not actually touching it), is it causes a highly blurred image, an image that appears to be moving. It works the other way too: If the camera is still, but the subject is not (remember, these long-exposure shots are usually used for taking pictures in the dark of objects that don't usually move: like the stars), the camera will take a Photodynamic shot. In this Instruction, I would like for you to keep your camera as steady as possible, and have someone, your subject (object?) move in some way.
Instruction 2: Attempt to take a moving shot, a blurry shot, of movement or laughter or talking, or etc... if it helps, turn your auto-focus off (this option is usually available in any camera, even cell phone cameras). Try to capture that moment of horror, as Bragaglia calls it.
Instruction 3: Manipulation of Photodynamism. On a photo editing program, place your image and then increase your blurring brush to the largest it can go. Swipe the brush once across the screen in an arched curving motion.
How are these products different? How are they the same? What do they tell us? What do they tell us about Photodynamism?
Showing posts with label Campany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Campany. Show all posts
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Reel Time (Campany Instructions 2)
For as long as anyone can remember, theater and film productions have not operated in real time. In fact, it is a rare moment when we see that happening. Sometimes, even conversations that, to us, last three minutes, three hours have passed. We are supposed to imagine that the conversation took a lot longer than that.
We see this conversely as well: Moments that would have actually lasted mere seconds slow down into the slow motion shot so that we can see that "SUDDENLY" moment, the moment of trauma or the punctum moment.
Tarantino states that there is anxiety present in these moments of real time. He says, "Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger .... we ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind" (34).
Hollis Frampton relates that there was a woman who wanted to video tape every moment of her life in real time. This is a production that will never be watched again in full, since it would take another person's whole life to watch this person's lived life, and that's really not fair. But for the moment, I would like us to attempt this. Multi-part instructions are below:
Instruction 1: Take a video that's sped up (May I suggest tutorial videos on youtube) and attempt to slow them down to real time. This may be difficult, of course, because many people choose those moments to cut their video, but attempt to do so. If there is a gap, attempt to put the gap in there.
Instruction 2: Videotape yourself doing something, anything. Washing dishes (like Jeanne Dielman), or driving to school, or whatever. Can you watch it all, start to finish? What does it mean that you can or can't? What happens if you speed it up? Slow it way down? What do you notice that you would not have noticed otherwise? Do you feel the time that it actually took to do whatever it was you did in the video (often, for instance, when we're waiting for something to happen, it seems to take forever)?
Gaensheimer states that "through the extreme slowing down of the movement, the greeting between the women seems to become divided up into a wealth of individual elements: each look, each movement, each fraction of a facial expression is released from the overall context of the story and stands out as meaningful," yet Miriam Rosen, in her interview by Chantal Akerman, states that, when she's filming, she doesn't want it to "'look real', I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes" (71, 195). These are two different kinds of times -- of the many that can be looked at -- that I want to investigate here through these instructions. Ultimately, how might they relate to the bigger picture project of Electracy?
We see this conversely as well: Moments that would have actually lasted mere seconds slow down into the slow motion shot so that we can see that "SUDDENLY" moment, the moment of trauma or the punctum moment.
Tarantino states that there is anxiety present in these moments of real time. He says, "Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger .... we ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind" (34).
Hollis Frampton relates that there was a woman who wanted to video tape every moment of her life in real time. This is a production that will never be watched again in full, since it would take another person's whole life to watch this person's lived life, and that's really not fair. But for the moment, I would like us to attempt this. Multi-part instructions are below:
Instruction 1: Take a video that's sped up (May I suggest tutorial videos on youtube) and attempt to slow them down to real time. This may be difficult, of course, because many people choose those moments to cut their video, but attempt to do so. If there is a gap, attempt to put the gap in there.
Instruction 2: Videotape yourself doing something, anything. Washing dishes (like Jeanne Dielman), or driving to school, or whatever. Can you watch it all, start to finish? What does it mean that you can or can't? What happens if you speed it up? Slow it way down? What do you notice that you would not have noticed otherwise? Do you feel the time that it actually took to do whatever it was you did in the video (often, for instance, when we're waiting for something to happen, it seems to take forever)?
Gaensheimer states that "through the extreme slowing down of the movement, the greeting between the women seems to become divided up into a wealth of individual elements: each look, each movement, each fraction of a facial expression is released from the overall context of the story and stands out as meaningful," yet Miriam Rosen, in her interview by Chantal Akerman, states that, when she's filming, she doesn't want it to "'look real', I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes" (71, 195). These are two different kinds of times -- of the many that can be looked at -- that I want to investigate here through these instructions. Ultimately, how might they relate to the bigger picture project of Electracy?
To Infinity (Campany Instructions 3)
"As the past is formed not after the present but simultaneously with it, therefore time must divide itself up into present and past in each of its individual moment ... By combining two one-minute videos .... projected one after the other in an endless loop, Rosemarie Trockel opposes the two forms of slowness which constitute the poles ... the representation of slowness by technically extending the moment, and the emergence of a consciousness of duration in the very process of perception" (77). Gaensheimer talks here about the strange way that time is perceived in film, and how it can be manipulated. The looping of films allows the viewer to be stuck in a present at the same time as they are stuck in the past. They have seen it, but they are seeing it still.
That looping mechanism is important to our understanding of time. And it is even more vital to our understanding of Electracy, I think, because time oftentimes doesn't seem like an element when we're thinking about the internet. Also, this kind of looping nature is inherent in the gif image type, where the the group of images that make up the seconds-long film loop constantly. There is time embedded into the gif when there is a sentence that runs through it that denotes the start and the end of the gif. And of course, it is obvious in most looping videos where the start and the end is.
A challenge, then, would be to make the gif in such a way that it would endlessly loop so that we really would not know where the start and the end is, so that the anticipation of a past/future/present can be eliminated. This is something that I think is really inherent in Electracy, and so this is what will make up this part of the instruction.
Instruction: Make an actual infinite looping gif. Remember, you must find a way that will subvert the idea of time. That means that this gif has to defy ontological expectations of some kind of an end.
That looping mechanism is important to our understanding of time. And it is even more vital to our understanding of Electracy, I think, because time oftentimes doesn't seem like an element when we're thinking about the internet. Also, this kind of looping nature is inherent in the gif image type, where the the group of images that make up the seconds-long film loop constantly. There is time embedded into the gif when there is a sentence that runs through it that denotes the start and the end of the gif. And of course, it is obvious in most looping videos where the start and the end is.
A challenge, then, would be to make the gif in such a way that it would endlessly loop so that we really would not know where the start and the end is, so that the anticipation of a past/future/present can be eliminated. This is something that I think is really inherent in Electracy, and so this is what will make up this part of the instruction.
Instruction: Make an actual infinite looping gif. Remember, you must find a way that will subvert the idea of time. That means that this gif has to defy ontological expectations of some kind of an end.
Photobombing (Campany Instructions 4)
When someone searches something on the internet, sometimes they
get some random results that don't have anything to do with each
other. That is part of what I want to call the montage-ablity of the internet. The internet automatically puts things together that we otherwise might not have thought to; it allows us to open up new roads for interesting projects. This is where such things as the Google poetry comes from.
Durand talks about a character who "suffers from a powerful mimetic compulsion that makes him crop up willy-nilly in all kinds of periods and situations, in all parts of the globe, like some ... parasite.... it is surely the consequence of never having read Moby Dick ... Not to have read this novel ... is ... to be condemned to floating around without the salutary ballast of a masterpiece ... is to run the risk of not being stabilized by the cohesive power of myth" (154).
I think it's interesting to think about the myth-making process that's involved with something like the internet, a place where objects that are comparable to American classics that are barely read by anyone might be floating. For instance, talk to anyone about Xanga and they might remember it, they might Google it and find it around, but I think a place like Xanga made up the building block of the blog community. To me, Xanga was the predecessor to popular blogging sites like, well, like this one.
Durand also talks about the movie Film Stills which recorded the filmmaker's life. I think this is important with regards to the quote about Moby Dick because it makes one think about the coorelation between having myth as some kind of a masthead that keeps one's life afloat but also anchored. What happens when one documents their lives and connect them to the lives of others: A genomic vs and individual reality (a la Stiegler).
Instruction: Make a video montage that combines four things: photos of your day, photos of your face at least once every day for a month, photos of random image searches of internet mythology or history or canon (perhaps Google maps), and photos of you imposed on these random images (you would essentially be photobombing these images virtually). These images, when placed together in your mini-film, should be randomized. What can you tell about your place in internet mythology? Are you like the character who hadn't read Moby Dick? If so, then so what?
Durand talks about a character who "suffers from a powerful mimetic compulsion that makes him crop up willy-nilly in all kinds of periods and situations, in all parts of the globe, like some ... parasite.... it is surely the consequence of never having read Moby Dick ... Not to have read this novel ... is ... to be condemned to floating around without the salutary ballast of a masterpiece ... is to run the risk of not being stabilized by the cohesive power of myth" (154).
I think it's interesting to think about the myth-making process that's involved with something like the internet, a place where objects that are comparable to American classics that are barely read by anyone might be floating. For instance, talk to anyone about Xanga and they might remember it, they might Google it and find it around, but I think a place like Xanga made up the building block of the blog community. To me, Xanga was the predecessor to popular blogging sites like, well, like this one.
Durand also talks about the movie Film Stills which recorded the filmmaker's life. I think this is important with regards to the quote about Moby Dick because it makes one think about the coorelation between having myth as some kind of a masthead that keeps one's life afloat but also anchored. What happens when one documents their lives and connect them to the lives of others: A genomic vs and individual reality (a la Stiegler).
Instruction: Make a video montage that combines four things: photos of your day, photos of your face at least once every day for a month, photos of random image searches of internet mythology or history or canon (perhaps Google maps), and photos of you imposed on these random images (you would essentially be photobombing these images virtually). These images, when placed together in your mini-film, should be randomized. What can you tell about your place in internet mythology? Are you like the character who hadn't read Moby Dick? If so, then so what?
The Wind's Wind (Campany Instructions 5)
Raul Ruiz says, "In front of my house, wind would move the trees. At a certain point the wind would blow with such regularity that one had the impression the trees were frozen in place, bent over in the same direction ... that moment of immobility gave the impression that movement and its opposite were not contradictory. ... This oscillation [between constant mobility and sudden immobility] gradually gave a new feeling to the scene: when everything moved about one only saw immobility, and vice-versa [sic]. I told myself this was a good way to photograph the wind" (140).
I quote this text by Ruiz because I think it says something both about the photograph (the media he is talking about in here) and film. Of course, filming the wind, it's constant movement and the way it changes the landscape) is a way to film something invisible (like how we film invisible men by the way the haystacks dent to denote his body). To think about the body of the wind in a photograph versus a film is interesting too.
Of course, a person who loves the wind, and as a person who utilized the wind in her Mystory when I talked about Pocahontas I think it's fascinating to try and signify something that is not visible to us. But what about the wind's wind?
In the movie Stay, a film kind of about a mentally distressed artist who can somehow predict future events, the artist is sitting in his lecture class listening to an art historian talk about some Goya paintings. The art historian says that although one cannot paint the wind, one can paint the wind's wind. I always thought that was an an awesome analysis, not only because it made sense, but also because it didn't make any sense at all. There is, for me, something uncanny about it.
We can see the wind's wind when we observe the way that smoke flows, for instance, as the art historian says. But there comes with this phrase a desire to think about a double invisibility: If one cannot photograph the wind, how can one photograph the (logically twice-removed) wind's wind? This is where Ruiz's process along with a kind of time-lapse comes into play, I think, to get us closer to the answer to this question.
Stimson stipulates that "in the first attempts to use serial photography to capture motion and narrative sequence, the aim was not to reproduce life as experienced in time but instead to see what cannot be seen by the naked eye, to see what can be seen only when time is stopped ... the camera was brought in to give visual testimony to what the eye on its own could not see by disarticulating the sequence of events, by breaking the narrative apart" (95).
This quote leads us to the instruction for this blog because it highlights the way that time lapse sequence photography allows for the invisibilities, for the gaps, for the stains of the wind and the wind's wind to show through somehow. This process, unlike but also so much like Ruiz's photographic methods, allows us to get closer to our desire to see the wind (so we can paint with these colors that Pocahontas sings about -- because we can sometimes actually see the wind in the movie).
Instruction: For this part, you need two cameras (one has to have the ability to take videos). Turn your flash off because that usually slows down the process of fast action photography. Put your camera's settings on the "sports" feature - since sports are often filled with fast-action movement, the sports feature allows for a very fast shutter speed that captures someone in motion (a little bit opposite of photodynamism). Some cameras or camera apps allow for sequence shots to be taken by just the click of one button, some cameras you have to keep clicking the button for the camera to take a series of photographs. Figure this out on your individual camera setting. Then, either wait for a windy day or utilize the power of an electric fan to simulate the wind, and take action shots at the same time that you take the video. Analyze the video side-by-side with the sequence shots: what can you see that you couldn't before?
Bonus instruction: Take the photographs out of sequence and then look through them again. What changes have occurred? Do you notice something different?
I quote this text by Ruiz because I think it says something both about the photograph (the media he is talking about in here) and film. Of course, filming the wind, it's constant movement and the way it changes the landscape) is a way to film something invisible (like how we film invisible men by the way the haystacks dent to denote his body). To think about the body of the wind in a photograph versus a film is interesting too.
Of course, a person who loves the wind, and as a person who utilized the wind in her Mystory when I talked about Pocahontas I think it's fascinating to try and signify something that is not visible to us. But what about the wind's wind?
In the movie Stay, a film kind of about a mentally distressed artist who can somehow predict future events, the artist is sitting in his lecture class listening to an art historian talk about some Goya paintings. The art historian says that although one cannot paint the wind, one can paint the wind's wind. I always thought that was an an awesome analysis, not only because it made sense, but also because it didn't make any sense at all. There is, for me, something uncanny about it.
We can see the wind's wind when we observe the way that smoke flows, for instance, as the art historian says. But there comes with this phrase a desire to think about a double invisibility: If one cannot photograph the wind, how can one photograph the (logically twice-removed) wind's wind? This is where Ruiz's process along with a kind of time-lapse comes into play, I think, to get us closer to the answer to this question.
Stimson stipulates that "in the first attempts to use serial photography to capture motion and narrative sequence, the aim was not to reproduce life as experienced in time but instead to see what cannot be seen by the naked eye, to see what can be seen only when time is stopped ... the camera was brought in to give visual testimony to what the eye on its own could not see by disarticulating the sequence of events, by breaking the narrative apart" (95).
This quote leads us to the instruction for this blog because it highlights the way that time lapse sequence photography allows for the invisibilities, for the gaps, for the stains of the wind and the wind's wind to show through somehow. This process, unlike but also so much like Ruiz's photographic methods, allows us to get closer to our desire to see the wind (so we can paint with these colors that Pocahontas sings about -- because we can sometimes actually see the wind in the movie).
Instruction: For this part, you need two cameras (one has to have the ability to take videos). Turn your flash off because that usually slows down the process of fast action photography. Put your camera's settings on the "sports" feature - since sports are often filled with fast-action movement, the sports feature allows for a very fast shutter speed that captures someone in motion (a little bit opposite of photodynamism). Some cameras or camera apps allow for sequence shots to be taken by just the click of one button, some cameras you have to keep clicking the button for the camera to take a series of photographs. Figure this out on your individual camera setting. Then, either wait for a windy day or utilize the power of an electric fan to simulate the wind, and take action shots at the same time that you take the video. Analyze the video side-by-side with the sequence shots: what can you see that you couldn't before?
Bonus instruction: Take the photographs out of sequence and then look through them again. What changes have occurred? Do you notice something different?
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