Cranford Rose Garden Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.
Whether at the scale of a frame, a tiny sample, or a period of days, digital is all about the manipulation of time. So it’s fitting that our friend Chris Jordan focuses in his work on the expressive potential of timelapse, and that he runs New York’s T-Minus, a festival devoted to timelapse. You’ve got some time to get in your submissions for this year’s T-Minus – the call for works follows – but I wanted to press Chris a bit on why manipulations of time are important to him, and what works he finds inspiring.
Among his picks, above from just over the river at the wonderful Brooklyn Botanic Garden (and yes, there are idyllic places like this within the five boroughs):
This time-lapse shows three days in the life of the Cranford Rose Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden as thousands of roses bloom in early June.
To create the unique perspective, each still frame of the video was treated with a tilt-shift lens effect in Photoshop.
For more information on the Cranford Rose Garden, visit bbg.org/roses
The music is by Jon Solo. His website is myspace.com/jonsolomusic.
Chris explains how he became a video Time Lord – and how even raindrops can take on new meaning when time is compressed. I got him thinking out loud in email:
It’s a jumble of things that draw me to time manipulated work, some personal, some societal, all technological.
One theme that inspires T-Minus is how boring the majority of documentation video is, yet the market sells more and more video cameras, and the entire industry around video is thriving. For what? Think how many times you’ve sat and watched a documented event. I think of the massive amount of energy and resources that go into consumer video. Wedding videos are a great example. Sure there may be something compelling to you if you’re the one at the alter. But we’re recording too much, saving it, calling it precious, and never actually seeing it again. Instead, if people captured timelapse, they would have the best of both worlds, and save petabytes of data.
The primary creative theme in time-based artwork that inspires me is the idea of the unexplored relationships surrounding us, just waiting to be unearthed. Video editors and VJ’s know some of the excitement around these relationships. But there’s generally in those contexts the studio mindset that comes into play, instilling classic ideas of composition, color, line, movement. I use the analogy of baking a cake to the capturing of time. You put the ingredients together, put it in the oven, and see what you get. The result always brings out a pattern you wouldn’t have seen or thought existed. I put a camera six feet out off my fire escape on East Broadway once, pointing up the street. When I compiled the footage, I was perplexed to see the frame shift significantly, yet very slowly, over the course of 12 hours. What I realized was when it rained during the recording, the water accumulation and then drying caused the board to warp and twist, shifting the camera’s view. Or how city lights appear through drying raindrops in front of the lens. Or how the shadow of a church slides across the buildings during certain times of the year out my studio window. All these things are incredibly intriguing to me.
Monet was able to paint scenes and light with such accuracy simply because of the invention of the tube of paint. Before the tube was created, painters couldn’t feasibly transport their equipment to different sites. Technology is only now allowing us to capture extended lengths of time using photography in the field. With a cheap camera and a battery, we now can gather time up like Monet did light. This is a first.
Ok. that’s not short, or concise. but I get worked up about this stuff.
If you’ve gotten fatigued of endless landscape timelapses, look no further than the combination of painting and time in the graffiti-based Barnstormers collective (seen here in German / English – apparently there’s no equivalent word for “fresh” in German):
Idioblast writes:
The Barnstormers are taking graffiti and collaborative painting to new levels. Their time-lapse pieces are legendary & each of the 15-20 members is an incredible artist in her/his own right.
I directed/shot this piece in July 2002, it aired sometime in late 2002 on the music -show ‘Tracks’ on french-german public tv Arte.
www.b-stormers.com
www.arte-tv.com/tracks
Also via Chris, a lunar eclipse as filmed by Peter Herron – shot as still images, and I think actually looks more interesting as the camera moves:
Chris also sends some of his work, which is all embedded on his site:
Here’s a few of my more recent recordings:
http://www.seej.net/create/2008/04/12/snailpod-at-yuris-night-ames-research-center/
http://www.seej.net/create/2008/05/30/optosonic-tea-with-john-cohrs-and-dan-vatsky/
http://www.seej.net/create/2008/03/22/g33k-xmas/
I have an installation on Gov. Island recording a timelapse saturdays and sundays, and projecting it off broken glass:
http://www.seej.net/create/category/timelapse/
The list goes on and on..there’s a ton of DIY’ers, writing articles about it, using the arduino and the CHDK powershot scripting…good stuff.
Oh, and if you haven’t seen this one, its a bit outdated, but definitely one of the best things I’ve ever captured:
http://www.seej.net/create/2006/02/12/the-largest-snowfall-in-new-york-recorded-history/
As Chris and I were having this conversation, I happened across videos by Tim Prebble, a film sound designer from Wellington, New Zealand (and CDMusic reader, as I recall). I appreciate these in particular because of Tim’s use of sound; clearly part of the art of this is the aural as well as the visual.
Tutukaka Timelapse from tim prebble on Vimeo.
Shibuya Tokyo Timelapse from tim prebble on Vimeo.
And let’s not forget one of my favorite timelapses, from CDM’s own Jaymis:
Red Iceblock Melting Outside Timelapse from Jaymis on Vimeo.
More stuff coming, as well, both from T-Minus and from Chris, as well; stay tuned.
So why not join in? Here’s the call for works for this year’s festival.
CALL FOR ENTRIES
Submissions sought that explore alternate methods of temporal presentation
Deadline: September 15, 2008
Abstract: As computers and cameras become increasingly ubiquitous, a greater number of creators are becoming interested in the artistic possibilities inherent in combining these technol
ogies. Time-distorted video is easily realized with affordable consumer equipment, and this ability has generated a wave of image-over-time interactive "physical computing" installations and homegrown timelapse projects. T-Minus seeks to bring together exceptional realizations that explore the union of digital media and time.
Guidelines
Submissions must either be completed works or include a detailed description of the entry. Materials will not be returned.
Ideal format: High resolution Quicktime files (using an open source free compression, nothing over 1920 x 1080 please). If enough of the submissions are in high definition, the work will be screened in its native resolution.
Acceptable format: DVD’s, AVI’s (again, standard formats please), Quicktime files above 640 x 480 pixels,
Unacceptable formats: VHS tapes, betamax, 5.25" floppy, 72mm film, ancient scroll, prom, happy meal, interpretive dance.
All copyrights to the work remain with the individual artists.
Include a one paragraph description of the piece with length, title, year; and your contact information (mail and email).
Please mail submissions to the following address:
T-Minus 2008
c/o Chris Jordan
149 E. Broadway #4
New York, NY 10002