For Love represents the reduction of a video into a single print. Similar to other Reductive Video works, the changes in motion and movement are layered to create impressions of these on-screen activities.
The source material for this exploration was appropriated from online amateur pornographic video-sharing websites.
These experiments in “Reductive Video” are an homage to the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Thomas Eakins, bringing their ideas into the 21st century by highlighting the changes in motion and movement as experienced and recorded by technology. Video is captured and processed, comparing one frame of video against the next. Only those pixels that differ from the previous frame are then displayed.
Baltimore Light Rail – Mount Royal Station – November 2009
Inspired by the Lumiere Brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895)”
Read the Reductive Video Project Statement / Watch the video overview
“Pixel lapse” photography is the process of creating an image one pixel at a time. Beginning in the upper left corner, pixels are captured sequentially at a set rate until the entire image is formed.
TRON (1982)
Steven Lisberger
571 x 243
“Now Playing” records the feeling of a movie – the overall color cast of each individual frame – and sequences it left to right / top to bottom in the same manner as our music and writing. Borrowing from the formatting of a computer screen, each frame of a video or film is reduced to the size of one pixel and placed next to the moment in time that preceded it.
sunrise
3 December 2006
1024 x 768 @ 100 px./sec
2 hr, 11 min, 15 sec
“Pixel lapse” photography is the process of creating an image one pixel at a time. Beginning in the upper left corner, pixels are captured sequentially at a set rate until the entire image is formed.
Daily we pass through neighborhoods without taking the opportunity to stop and look. We know nothing of the people that populate these communities. We are passersby – in a car, riding the light rail, or on foot – traveling too quickly, witnessing nothing of our surroundings.
We have been taught boundaries. We have been taught were to go and where not to go. We draw maps to delineate countries, states, counties, cities, and even neighborhoods. But these maps represent our division…
Within the artistic realm, there is the potential for manipulation, damage, decay, or loss to be exhibited as a creative process. This creation/damage itself occurs both because of, and in spite of, human interaction. The resulting artwork emerges from the collaboration between the disruptor of data and the reorganizer/interpreter of information.
Project Statement
We live in a technocentric society. Willingly we trade away stability, permanence, and the desire to investigate in favor of increased speed, miniaturization, and the easy, instant access to information. The transient nature of information has been mapped upon the tangible aspects of our lives.
At what point did the world decide that impermanence was better than permanence, that the degradation of our products, disintegration of our literature, dissipation of our history, or the deciduous nature of our art would become desirable, acceptable, reasonable?
Unacceptable!
As things begin to decay, they may create a visual appeal and a scientific interest; but the beauty of natural decay is organic. Its degradation is a creative process developing a new form while retaining aspects of its prior self. Digital decay is destructive. Data is lost, yet its loss is accepted. Should it be abhorred? Should it be tolerated? Is there a place where it should be desired?
Accordion Style book:
Liquid Emulsion on Watercolor paper, wooden frames, piano hinges, color inkjet
Steven H Silberg 