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All these posts are relevant, they are further investigations into my field of inquiry. They all relate to my final output choice: Chronophotography. A key point of evolution in my practice is reflected in ‘Documenting water’ at the beginning of UNIT2. This blog has been highlighted in green (please see below).
For further contextualization on my work, please refer to UNIT 1 contextualization category.
Memor mens reputo pariter (Great minds think alike)
Here I refer to the practices of Mike and Dough Starn, Susan Collins, Roni Horn, and FADE ‘s book The personalised surface and how they all made me reflect upon the output surface of digital art and the concepts of archiving and capturing of time.
The art of Chronophotography
In this blog I show my first work on Chronophotography. I talk about its history and its first practitioner Étienne-Jules Marey.
Landscape and the moving image
Here I look into some references of moving image that deal with the landscape. William Raban, Genevive Staines and Emily Richardson are inspirational examples of experimental and digital moving image pieces that subvert linear narratives.
Documenting water
This is where I reflect on making a moving image piece with water as my main subject and I refer to time lapse photography as an appropriate output. I reference futurist Anton Bragaglia (1913)
“We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation”.
I had a productive talk with Finlay Taylor (MA Print Making Tutor) about my work. When I asked him about contextualization he mentioned the work of Mike and Dough Starn as they work with digital photography and experiment with their output, transforming it into a mixed media work. He recommended that I read ‘ The personalised surface: new approaches to digital printmaking’ by FADE. I already got this book from an earlier visit to FADE at Chelsea.
Looking at these two references made me think about the importance of surface. Artists have been preoccupied with surfaces for hundreds of years. Our response to surfaces changes and evolves with time. Digital imagery can have many different outputs, this is very inspiring. By choosing a traditional printing surface output for my valves I am expressing my intention of creating a parallel between the time of the industrial revolution and our time and also making a reference to the encapsulation of time.
Blot Out the Sun, Archival inkjet prints with encaustic and wax
He also mentioned the work of digital artist Susan Collins as she recently had an exhibition involving water. Her work, titled Seascape, consisted of a live transmission of the landscape from 5 webcams located along the the south coast of England, relayed on individual screens at the De La Warr Pavillion. This work references my water chronophotography; in the sense that having a live transmission connects with the documentary field, although her time references are to present events, to the notion of modern webcam surveillance and the instantaneity of communication. Still, the peaceful nature of the images bring us to reflection and connects with the pensive quality of photography.
Seascape, 2009
But most importantly he mentioned Roni Horn.
Roni Horn is an American artist that has been making work since the sixties. The theme of water is recurrent on her work. One of her most recent works consist of an installation in Iceland (2007). It is based in Stykkishólmur, a small town near Reykjavík. VATNASAFN / LIBRARY OF WATER is a community centre that houses two installations on a long-term basis: the bilingual rubber floor You are the Weather (Iceland) and the sculpture Water, Selected. Water, Selected is an archive of water from 24 glacial sources across Iceland, housed in floor-to-ceiling glass columns (approximately 1ft in diameter by 10ft high). This is an active archive collecting Icelanders’ stories of their weather, intended as an ongoing, an ever-resolving work. The archiving purpose of this work really interest me as it has resonances with my own project as it also does another of her famous pieces, Still Water (1999).
Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) is a series of fifteen large photographs of water, printed on white paper. Each of the images focuses on a small area of the surface of the river Thames. Every print differs in colour and texture. On close inspection of the images we can see tiny numbers in typeface are dotted over the water’s surface. These numbers refer to footnotes printed along the lower edge of each image’s white border. The footnotes present a series of musings and quotations on the significance of the river and the moods and narratives it evokes.
I find that the combination of Still Water imagery and the archival intention of Water, Selected comes very near to my own work, although my archival intention is not to do with folklore and weather and my water images are not just stills, the output form of my work is a chronophotography movie. Chronophotography allows for a metaphorical archival sense, an accumulation of visual representations of water that remind us of the influence that the still image has on moving image documentary; the use of freeze frame emphasizes the ’pastness’ of the ‘still’ and creates a signifier of the memorable.
I guess that the old Latin phrase “nihil sub sole novum”(There is nothing new under the sun) still applies…but saying that, “Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est” (Knowledge is power). So now that I have discovered her work I can look at mine and contemplate the differences that will assert my own practice.
Location: Regents canal, Andrew’s Road, Hackney
The London canal system played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution, at the time the most common way of transport in land were pack horses. Canals became a reliable way to transport goods. The early 19th century was their golden age, a good number of canals were built and shipping companies flourished.
Regent’s Canal started to be built in 1812 and was extensively used for the transport of merchandise. Most canals fell into decline by 1920s when steam trains became the regular means of transport, however Regent’s Canal continued to be have commercial traffic till 1948 when it was nationalised, by this time the canal’s importance for commerce was dwindling. By the late 1960s commercial vessels had almost ceased to operate. In 1969 the closure of the Regent’s Canal Dock put an end to shipping.
After a few visits to the same spot and 6.681 photographs later I have 5 different captures to start working on compositing time lapse photography footage. The images where taken at regular intervals of 5 seconds from a fixed viewpoint. Below there are examples of individual frames of different footage:
11.00am. Canon EOS20D, 50mm, 200 ISO, f5.6
11.00am. Canon EOS20D, 35mm, 200 ISO, f8
11.00am. Canon EOS40D, 50mm, 200 ISO, f8
11.00am. Canon EOS40D, 50mm, 200 ISO, f8
11.00am. Canon EOS40D, 35mm, 200 ISO, f8
I took this images on a small fine quality setting which equals 1728 x 1152 pixels. If we look at video image quality we can see that HDV can be 1280 x 720 or 1440 x 1080 and HDTV (wide screen) would be 1920 x 1080 so the small fine quality is a good choice for the chosen output.
Chronophotography, a bit of history…
The capture of sequences of images was used at the end of the nineteenth century in a scientific manner to study movement for a variety of purpose such as medicine, biology (by practitioners such as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard J. Muybridge) and ‘scientific management’ techniques for industrial efficiency (Frederick Winslow Taylor). At the beginning of the twenty first century we find artist using these techniques exploring the growing relationship between cinema, photography and what lies in between, this presented a number of possibilities and ideas that have been taken forward within the visual arts. According to Ian Roberston, Chronophotography alludes to ‘…issues regarding the veracity of photography, the use of serialism and repetition, the role of memory and imagination in acts of perception and our subjective experience of time and space developed by Bergson in his theories on felt time and duration which he developed contemporaneously with chronophotography’.
E.J Marey has had a great influence in artistic practice, although the initial intention of his work was scientific his work has been considered not only an influence but art itself. Marey used the term Chronophotography to describe a set of photographs of a moving image taken from the same viewpoint at equal intervals. His work was exhibited in Paris (Palais de Chaillot 1963) along with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Gino Severini. This exhibition linked the work of Marey with the Avant Garde; setting a relationship in between Chronophotography, Conceptual Art, Surrealism and Futurism.
In 1891 E.J Marey recorded ‘La Vague‘ on the bay of Naples. He was seeking a better understanding of movement. In his analysis he remains objective, his work was developed out of methodological and precise experiments and following a positivist attitude with its coherence, logic and attention to detail. His work also can be seen within the realm of artistic representation as throughout the course of his ‘experiments’ he cultivated a passion for the intangible, the movements of fluids such as air, water and smoke. He allowed the beauty of the shapes he observed to develop within the simplicity of the arrested image.
Étienne-Jules Marey, La Vague, 1891
Another example of Marey’s chronophotography, a collection of his films on Body Motions dating 1893:
As a reference to my moving image piece I looked into some video pieces that deal with landscape. The representation of landscape, including water, started to be challenged by video artists in the 1960s and 1970s, creating experimental pieces under the influence of writers such as John Berger (author of ‘Ways of Seeing’). A representation of this tendency can be seen in the work of William Raban where the action of the elements on the capturing technology was central to the work. Technology being central to the art work is an occurrence that is quite common with digital artists. In my own project the production process is crucial to the construction of the overall narrative of my work, mixing digital and analogue technologies to create an output that is informed by different layers of photographic processes and theories.
William Raban, Thames Barrier, 1977, 8 minutes (using 3 synchronised cameras to capture and shown on 3 synchronised 16mm projectors)
More recently, contemporary technologies have allowed artists to use new strategies that allows us to contemplate the unnatural world of the landscape, compressing and expanding the time and space relationship.
Genevive Staines through her digital video piece Ruins in Reverse: Selective Landscape Painting, explores the blurring of the past, present and future by systematicaly erasing the architecture from her chosen landscape.
Ruins in Reverse: Selective Landscape Painting
Genevieve Staines, 2005, 5 min
Emily Richardson’s work looks at the architecture of the Scottish oil industry. This landscape has been documented as a time lapse piece using long exposures. There is a documentary intention in this work and an emotional response to the landscape as this kind of industry is closing down and disappearing. The photographic nature of this work creates an alternative perspective creating impossible experiences of the environment.
Emily Richardson, Petrolia, 2004, 7 min
I am interested in these video artists because of their approach to the landscape. Digital technologies have allowed us to create impressions of our surroundings that refresh our perceptions. Staines work is very interesting as with its simplicity it subverts linear narratives and encapsulates time. It makes us think about how we respond to landscape and the changing environment. In some ways, this line of questioning is what activates the archival desire for the purpose of memory. These two concepts, encapsulation of time and archival desire are central to my work.
As with Richardsons’s film, my project deals with industrialism, it shares a certain de-familiarisation with the mechanical structures and machinery that still exist in our landscape. This feeling was also present in the industrial revolution when these structures where created, which creates a parallel between these two times. Petrolia has an eerie beauty that appeals to my own sense of aesthetics, it is an account of the ‘life’ of the structures from a distant and detached position which could make reference to the style of the New Objectivity movement that has also influenced my approach.
Canal water-DV.( First attempt that has made me think about changing my method to lapse photography).
As part of my project I am including a piece of moving image made out of time lapse photography. I am not very happy with the outcome of the above video, which was filmed with a DV camera. It is a good starting point but I think that time lapse photography as an output for my methodology may provide a closer result to what I intend to portray and it will be more coherent with the rest of my project.
As well as documenting the machines and the spaces where the machines are housed I wanted to make a connection not only to the outside but also to an element with which all these inventions/technological advances depend upon: water. My project in this way will document three different elements, looking from the inside out. The valves are an essential artifact for the machine to function, they are a direct referent to the human/machine relationship and dependency. The architectural spaces are a testimony to the people that worked there and the engineers that constructed them. The water unifies everything making a connection with environment and the vital force that made this new technology possible.
The way I want to represent the water is through moving image. I am exploring the possibility of making a lapse photography video which will provide continuity on my methodology, using photography as the base of my practice and allowing me to continue developing my skills on that discipline. It will also provide a better quality image than standard digital video footage and will allow me to work with a bit more flexibility in post production (work yet to be done). I am considering presenting this work as a masked projection that fits into a light-box. The concept would be to have three light boxes, the two on the sides will have a still photographic images and the one in the center will have the projected moving image.
By using moving image constructed out of photographic stills I am also making a reference to the old relationship that exists in between photography and film. If we look at film, in a traditional sense, we see that it was composed out of still images that would go one on top of another constructing continuity and creating movement. Lapse photography allows the subversion of real time to a different pace, it creates a juxtaposition of technologies, photography representing a pensive moment and film representing the present. It also touches the dichotomy of configuration/de-configuration. Photographs when showed one after the other give us the illusion of motion whilst presenting individually captured moments, static images that allow us to contemplate the subtleties of an element in motion.
There is an interesting quote from Anton Bragaglia (1913), Italian futurist photographer who developed Fotodinamismo:
“We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation”.
Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Uomo che suona il contrabbasso
Anton Bragaglia used multiple exposure photography to capture motion. The intention of capturing movement with his experimental photography is related to lapse photography although in its base it is quite a different methodology. Personally I find this quote interesting because it talks about the vibration and the essence of a movement captured in the surface of the photograph, these qualities can also be applied to lapse photography where movement is explored and meditated, sometimes giving it a hypnotic quality that allows the triggering of our memory function.
