Jimbo and me are doing some slitscan experiments. Jim is following a course were he has to make a work in the public space. The project will be placed in a (still-to-be-build) neighborhood nearby the train station (Hasselt). While prospecting the area we noticed the relation between the neighborhood and the station will be absent whereas we think the station is one of the main landmarks in the area.
So we’re trying to transpose some of the characteristics of the station to the neighborhood. The sound and the trains themselves are rather important of course, but also the aspect of time dominates the train station. This is visually shown in various clocks and in displays showing the arrival hours of the trains and their delay times. But more importantly time is the measurement we use in the station. We use it to be on time to take a certain train and we count it when we are waiting for train.
Trying to combine these aspects I proposed to use slitscans. Last year I was amazed by their beauty in the work of Jeremy Wood. Basically the slitscan is a small picture placed next to another small picture you took a second ago and so on. The result is a distorted picture showing the evolution of a location in time. I started experimenting with it some months ago in processing. Now we are fine tuning a basic patch from the processing forum with the results from these experiments.
This first test showed us the beauty of the slitscan. No movement in front of the camera results in a beautiful abstract image. When people move in front of the camera they become a very small line. Moving people and trains further away from the camera become visible.
Further development will include a pinpoint microphone to isolate the sound in front of the camera (because the relation between the sound and the image is a bit odd sometimes). We will also rewrite the slitscan patch because with the current patch there is a “break” when the image is at the end of the screen and continues on the other side of the screen.
- Field Commander Jim: trackback