translated says:
I guess this is the purest example of duration - of what happens when video becomes a still because it's a 1:28 minute still photograph. Even knowing that nothing is going to happen after having watched it several times there's still a question about whether a flicker or a slight jog of the camera might have been missed. In other words there's an attentiveness to the possibility of change even where there is none. To me this is an entirely different experience from looking at at an otherwise identical still where I would be much more attentive to composition, color, light, etc. The title is important too because it makes explicit the invitation to watch while nothing happens.
translated says:
According to Wikipedia:
"A geostationary orbit can only be achieved at an altitude very close to 35,786 km (22,236 mi), and directly above the equator. This equates to an orbital velocity of 3.07 km/s (1.91 mi/s) or a period of 1,436 minutes"
I don't know if the spaceman in this sculpture was imagined in a geostationary orbit, but if he's not moving at a velocity of 3.07 km/s, he's somewhere in that region. That he's been made out of concrete just exaggerates the strangeness of being both completely still and moving at thousands of meters per second.
translated says:
Sleeping at 60 mph. I see this as a still companion of the Lliesse "Before/ɹǝʇɟɐ" video, but in the photograph the old passenger can sleep for ever because the bus will never arrive. In "Photography and Fetish" Metz writes:
"the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world and into another world, into another kind of time".
This absence of time in the still photograph is quite different from film/video, which recreates an unfolding time similar to that of life.
translated says:
This is one of several examples of work here that use accident. The trucks emerge from the right and then the left and then the right again in perfect time. In the comments secret squirrel6 says it was "like watching a tennis match" and to me this video exemplifies almost pure watching - it's as though the camera is magnetised by the trucks and can't help following their movement. In this sense I think of the camera as occupying an extremely passive position - all it does is follow.
The result is a kind of pure video where movement is the subject matter, which means that what is depicted here cannot be caught by a still image.
I also like the title "Filmed by secret squirrel" because the angle and the distance from the road sure make it look like it could have been filmed by a secret squirrel : )
translated says:
Seeing this really got me interested in the relation between still and video. It's as though it really doesn't know which it is and that indecision replicates itself in my identity as a spectator. Do I have the freedom of the viewer of the still photograph who can look at an image as long as she chooses to do so, or am I a spectator of video who must submit my gaze to a pre-determined duration? The different kinds of time implicit in still and video have been scrambled by this work.
The title is critical because it heightens this sense that perhaps the rules have been broken and that something irretrievably lost to the past in an "ever- receding then" has somehow been impossibly re-captured for the present.
translated says:
This is the only still here that uses long exposure - the compromise still photography makes with movement to allow itself to see.
To me the water in the foreground and middle distance works as a kind of literal and metaphorical separation of the camera from the bustle of the port. It's not just that its too dark to photograph much, but that the camera is too far away to see the action and the lights in the distance seem almost like a line of text to be read.
To me this photo demands a kind of slow, lingering kind of look that's associated with watching video.
translated says:
Perhaps air travel exemplifies the almost complete blurring of speed and stillness; of still photography and video. Looking at this it doesn't really matter if it is a still or a video.
Metz had written "In all photographs, we have this same act of cutting off a piece of space and time , of keeping it unchanged wile the world around continues to change", but it doesn't really make sense here. The spectator, the camera, and the plane are all travelling at something like 500 mph, but the past is retreating so slowly as to make change almost imperceptible.
translated says:
If "6 stolen seconds held" breaks the rules and creates a kind of crisis in the identity of the spectator, this follows the rules explicitly. When the bus is moving, I'm watching a video, and when the bus stops I'm looking at a still. Or at least that's an easy spin on this, but it's more complicated because really the video is continuous and what gets switched as the bus stops is the location of movement, which switches from inside the camera to outside the camera and back.
This maybe goes to an essential dynamic within travel which is the shift between the observation of movement and the experience of movement: watching other things move reinforces my feeling of stillness; of making no progress towards my destination. Experiencing movement does the opposite.
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