Lost in Time

Still feeling a bit bogged down, unable to figure out the conceptual framework for my project and exactly what it is I am trying to achieve, show and convey, I took some time to get some books related to Futurism and Modern art to help me explore deeper some of the concepts I've touched on so far. One book I found particularly helpful was 'Themes of Contemporary Art - Visual Art after 1980' by Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel.

The book was broken into several sections, focusing on different themes: time, place, identity, the body, language, exploring each in terms of historical context, influential factors and modern day interpretations (fairly recent - published / printed in 2005). The sections I found particularly interesting and relevant were time and the human body.

Time was an obvious connection as I'd been exploring ideas of speed and modern life. The key idea that came through was that social and technological changes, as well as changes in our understanding of the physical and psychological universes we inhabit are reshaping the ways we perceive and conceive of time. The Futurists' imagery reflected the sped up tempo of urban life made possible by new inventions where now our concepts of time have been warped by newly emerging technologies and networks that offer instantaneous information (e.g. cellphones, the internet).

The medium with which I work best, photography, suits and supports the notion of time measured through movement. A photograph can represent the accelerated pace of modern life by recording in sharp frozen detail a minute slice of movement, too quick for the eye to see. Though photography was not accepted by the futurists as an art form as its static and lifeless nature was antithetical to the Futurist concept of ‘universal dynamism’. However, techniques such as photodynamism, chronophotography or (less commonly) strobophotography were able to achieve a dynamic recording of movement over a long exposure time.

Image source

The resulting effect created and emphasis on the continuity of motion and moving objects, not unlike how the futurists created a painted sequence of movements sweeping across a single composition, abstracted by linking the phases of movement with geometric colour structures. I decided to experiment with this technique myself just to explore the idea.

The above effect was reasonably easily achieved, with help from Ryan. Our setup included a dark room, my camera set on extended exposure, ranging from 10-30 seconds whilst Ryan was firing his flash on strobe ranging from 10-30hz as I performed various movements. I was pleased with the effects and was then thinking about how this sort of technique could be employed in my project.

In my research, I came across a quote by Milan Kunkera: "Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?" This comes from a book he wrote called 'Slowness' and is a comment of how the sense of time has accelerated from previous generations. This book was written in 1995 so it would be interesting to see what he has to say about the pace of modern life now!

So with these ideas in mind, I want to reflect through my project this concept that in our accelerated modern life, we expect everything to be so fast paced and instantaneous that we miss out on the sensations, the details, the experiences in between. We have so many responsibilities and places to be simultaneously that our perception of time is warped, we have lost the ability to place events in any temporal or historical context.

This now has to be taking back in conjunction with the suitcase itself and how I will chose to represent it.

Speed and Machines

Following my previous developments in exploration of ideas, I realised I needed to again return to the conceptual basis. I had been focusing on the idea of modern life and it's pressures realised I needed to take a viewpoint so I could make a clear statement through my work.

I came across this quote: There is more to life than increasing its speed. ~Mohandas K. Gandhi and so it was from here I starting exploring the idea of speed in modern life and the art of the futurist movement.

The futurists embraced an exciting new world which transformed by machines and technology; they loved the speed, noise, pollution and cities. They aimed to express the energetic and dynamic quality of contemporary life embodied in the motion and force of modern machinery, representing also the technological triumph of man over nature.

They adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several views of an object simultaneously and used rhythmic spatial repetitions in an attempt to convey feelings and sensations experimented in time.

Technology, time and speed have become interchangeable and ubiquitous forces in the modern life we know today; speed is not so much embraced as a given part of life to cope with. Speed is the yardstick by which we measure productivity, efficiency, distance, value. It is no longer a matter of 'how fast', but 'how much faster'.

“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world” - Margaret Mead quotes

The more stresses, pressures, responsibilities we 'pack' into our lives increases the rate at which is passes us by. The Futurists depicted their world view through multifaceted, multidimensional shapes and multicolored and flowing brushstrokes to express their perceived world as one which is in constant movement.

So what is our world now, 100 or so years later?

Speed kills colour... the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray. ~Paul Morand

But with increased speed comes a threshold, a breaking point, where there is a loss of control, a distortion in perspective, an unrealistic sense of experience. We talk about how time is going so fast and passes us by; but time is a constant and it is life as it becomes increasingly more 'modern' that is speeding up. We speed through our days and our lives until they are only a blur, reaching the end destination and remembering nothing from the journey.

My direction from here is still not completely resolved. A possible development from the timelapse which I am yet to try is to use images with longer exposures. For example, rather than the lapse ranging from an image of one car on the motorway through to an image of a traffic jam on the motorway, using images ranging from an image taken of the motorway on a fast shutter speed to it appears stationary, through to an image taken on an extended exposure to give the impression of speed and movement.

With this concept now, I need to explore ways to incorporate relationships between the different sensors and how I can integrate both the input and outputs to communicate within this conceptual framework.