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