Author: Kaitlyn

Memorabilia Before Impact: A Collection of Objects the Moment They Hit the Ground

The goal of my project was to develop a machine whose process of capture would a destructive one. I was inspired by quantum physics research, for the moment any data is collective, the object of interest has changed or has been destroyed as a result. I wanted to develop a machine that illustrated this concept in a more tangible processes that was connected to a more human experience. This project takes objects that are marketed to be of sentimental value and captures these objects the moment before they shatter. By filming them using a 960-fps camera and recording the sound I capture the image of the object as whole but allude the sound of its death implying the object is no longer in existence.

I wanted to present my objects as small snapshots of each moment. The objects that I am presenting aim to tell a story of a single individual is has gone through life purchasing these objects dedicated to capturing special moments. The object that were meant to hold a memory now live in a digital shelf where they no longer exist in the physical realm.

The end result of my project still has room to grow. I think an opportunity that I could explore is to have several groups of objects that could be linked to multiple people and their objects. This single set, I believe appears to be a single person of a specific taste, but I would love to have multiple collections that go to tell a variety of memorabilia. Another improvement could be to rather than use a high-speed camera is to take this concept a step further and step up a camera to a pressure plate and link the drop of the object to the camera to only capture a single frame the moment it hits the ground. In this collection method, the machine can only document and remember the object has whole and has no evidence that it was changed or broken in the process.

Typology Proposal: Capture by Breaking

For my typology I wanted to capture fragile object just before breaking. Using the slow-motion camera, I wanted to film dishes being dropped and capture the moment when an object hits the floor but before breaking. The concept of my project is to create a machine whose process for documentation results in the destruction of the object captured.

I have made several tests with the iPhone slow-motion camera, but the results have only been extremely blurry photographs. I have been testing with a bouncy ball, making clean up non-existent, and have found that by looking at the spike in the audio, it allows me to look 1 frame beforehand to see the object (if ignore the blur) sitting on the floor. This allows me to catch the moment in which the object is perfectly intact and almost balancing perfect on the floor.

Also, as an additional thought I was thinking to include with each image a decibel reading of the loudest moment with the dish breaks. I thought it might give the piece an interesting feeling to have all the objects intact perfectly ‘balancing’ on the floor with the sound of its destruction next to it. But at the same time, I feel that it would ruin the schrodinger’s cat idea where the view is in anticipation and in an unknown state is the object is indeed destroyed of if it survived the impact.

Some inspiration:

Billy Violla (slow-motion video artist): https://vimeo.com/64302190

Robert Morris: https://www.wikiart.org/en/robert-morris/box-with-the-sound-of-its-own-making-1961

The Slow-Mo Guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVOb3RzS5t4

 

Postphotography: Response

One example of a human-nonhuman process that Zylinska talks about is the search for dark matter. I had very recently attended a lecture describing the locating of possible dark matter, something that leaves a gravitational imprint but cannot be detected via any other known method. Scientist use advanced telescope and other advanced astronomical measurements, (that I unfortunately did not catch) to view an immensely detailed view of a snippet of the universe. By using the human eye, we can look at galaxy shapes and other patterns in galaxy formation to hypothesize the where about of dark matter. Then trading it back off to the computer for finer details in terms of the actual amount and the coordinates of the possible whereabouts. This process of non-human to human to non-human then back again to human filters through the visual information that is deemed unnecessary to hone in on the invisible.

Photography and Observation: Response

When thinking about photography as a scientific medium I have always been under the impression that photography enabled a sense of standardization and comparability in data collection. So upon reading that in the 1800s that “standardization was not one of photography’s strong points” (pg. 23) I was completely baffled. I was fascinated to learn how the different photographic plates make objectivity and reproducibility a bit more hazy than I would have envisioned for astronomical scientific photographs.

However, when doing a research internship at university of Washington I was charged with the job to locate defects within a crystal structure using photoluminescence. The data I was looking at were all raster scans of various areas of the nanosheets that contained bright and dark spots. However, the actual reading of these images was more or less guess work.  Even through our images could be classified as ‘objective’ the reading and interpretation of the images was quite subjective. This astounded me for we often viewed these  photographs as ‘truth’ when really it is the interpretation of the images that can cause confusion and debates.

Photogrammetry: Pencil Case

when I was taking photos I was rotating the object rather than moving myself around the object. Once I put all the images in Metashape I realized that because the background is constant rather than thinking that I rotated around the object it knows all the photos were taken in a single place and now I have a bit of a goopy photogrammetry model.

Response: Marianne, Eliasson’s Water Pendulum

Marianne’s post introduced Eliasson’s water pendulum, a water stream illuminated by strobe light to highlight the unpredictable flow of water. This reminded me of Daniel Wurtzel’s work which shows the chaotic nature of air currents and how it can be made visible through various materials. however, rather than focusing on the erratic movements of the air currents Wurtzel has tried to highlight the fluidity and beauty of this unstable movement by often incorporating dancers or other performers to interact with the materials trapped in his invisible vortex.

Air Fountain | Daniel Wurtzel

artist website: http://www.danielwurtzel.com/index.cfm 

(also reviewed: David, Steven, Joyce, and Oscar)

 

Austine Comarow, Polage Art – Project to Share

Austine Comarow, is an artist that works with light and manipulates the polarity of light in order to create bright colourful images. By using specific plastics, she is able to create patterns by altering the wavelength of polarized light which can only be revealed when looked through another filter. By doing so she is able to “encode” images in light without the audience realizing it until looked at through a special filter thus revealing a new image. I find this to be particularly interesting because she is was able to take relatively basic physics problem make it magical and unreal through this revealing and changing of light.

https://www.austine.com/

Breaking Wave – Austine Studios

The Camera, Response

When I was reading this article, I found the Clips project to be especially interesting in terms of operator and user for it places the operator as the initial programmer and the program itself. However, the user has decided where to place the camera and has left it there to “record,” so in that sense it is very similar to if someone strategically placed their video camera and left it to record for a prolonged period of time. Therefore, in this sense, this still places authorship and operator to the individual who initially placed the camera.

What drew my attention the most however was how image processing algorithms can use real images to “manufacture” reality by either manipulating the image itself into an ideal or creating data in places where it was lost or not received. This places concepts of reality and how we perceive reality into the programmer’s hands. For when choosing and making algorithms for image processing programs they are deciding what is natural and what is real and projecting these assumptions onto us. This can be extremely harmful for, I personally believe, that we are an extremely dependent on visual information and will almost always define truth to be seeing.