adr 2 - assignment 9: motion v.3
the three versions play with different blending techniques within the composite, vaguely hard, intermediate & soft… i think that i am the most fond of the first because it lends an ambiguity to the drawing & the relative softness of its lines
adr assingment 8: considering motion as a fixed point
I took a segment of video & captured from it 52 frames & modfified the contrast of each of those frames in photoshop. I took the high contrast images from photoshop into illustrator where I ran a contrast analysis on each of the frames using a custom Live Trace profile. Live Trace generated vectors for each of the areas that I had calibrated the frames for in photoshop, I took these vectors into rhino to interpolate 3 intermediate vector sets between each of the original 52 frames to enhance the resolution of the image. Each interpolation is progressively faded, since they are increasingly guesses & more representative of the governing algorhythm than the original frame. I then compiled all 208 images in illustrator, organizing them around the object that tracked through the frame in the video so that the object is stationary & the field/frame moves around it. The consequence of this is that the sensation of motion in the video, which is from left-to-right/bottom-to-top, is reversed in the image as right-to-left/top-to-bottom (the difference between watching a car pass & sitting in the car watching the world pass). The other consequence is that objects of each frame that exist only within the x-y plane are “extruded” along a suggested third z-axis not of depth but of time - so the volumes in the image are not volumetric via their depth but via delta x-y per increment of time relative to a point treated as fixed in both space & represented time. I preserved the frame boundary (the obnoxious square) as a notation of relative position governed by the camera frame.
I ended up with this method from a vague consideration of general relativity that has baffled me: that is that time is relative & has no innate metric except in as much as it is the meter by which change is incremental. If change happens more rapidly or slowly, time (only ever as the perception of change) is either fast or slow. So time is the catalogue or memory of perception as it is displaced; anything that happens over time, i.e. traveling from ‘a’ to ‘b’ is “volumetric” (fluid adaption of a three-dimensional presence over a period of time) only in our capacity to recall & interpolate the “data points” that were generated between then & now…
A continuing mediation on light… Touch is the nearest perception of instantaneous awareness that we possess. However, touch is rare & more often we perceive of the object through sight where light instead of tactility is our referent. Unlike touch, light is a transient projection, the visual object is disconnected in both time & space: it exists somewhere between the referent object & the viewer & is subsequent to this divorce a temporal relic. The referent object may have vanished yet an instant of its existence persists in the light it had touched. As long as the object exists it will continue to pulsate light, but perception of this light after it has been reflected is only ever an indication that something was. What is seen is neither present nor so any longer, in this way sight is a lament.
In short, if you were to be touching the object at the instant it disappeared, you would register its absence tactilely while its image had yet to betray its absence.
Architecture is predominantly visual; consequently it is elsewhere& past-tense. Ergo, the drawing of architecture is the fastening of the past-tense in a visual medium that can only ever be perceived as what was. Visually, architecture & drawing are the rhythmic pulsations of what has been & in this way are a disembodied beckoning of what is elsewhere & may no longer be.
The extension of this concept toward architecture of the memorial is particularly poignant.
