Sunday 8 November 2015

Messing with Time and Geometry

[This continues my earlier post "Wire Reflex - some video ideas based on geometry and time"]

This is an extract from a short video Street Scene (the first draft of which is available on Vimeo).

The video is a geometric transformation of a scene from a Cafe window. In this extract I have selected slices from different frames of the original video, so that time is running horizontally across the image.

In the fuller version on vimeo, I have also use a section of the same video, but with time running down the image rather than across.

I like the abstract effect, yet it is still clearly something real.

The extract above does not have the final audio. That is on the Vimeo version.

The audio on the extract is simply a drum being hit. It is two near-2-second loops, mixed so that they go increasingly out of phase.

On the full version this is supplemented with three near-10-second loops of the ambient sounds in the Cafe. These additional loops are also mixed so that they drift apart over time. The idea is that, while the sound is apparently familiar Cafe noise, it should be eerily musical, because of the repetition.

Just so, the moving image.

Both image and audio have been subjected to geometrical transformation. The images are transformed by transposing the spacial and time dimensions. The audio has been subjected to the "geometric" transformations of looping and phasing. The images and audio are linked by the choice of parameters used to specify these transformations.

Here is an extract from another video made with the same transformations. This time we see the ocean surf as standing waves.
This work is experimental.