installation, mixed media
2005

Synopsis

Spatio-temporal makes a cross cut into the properties of presence and motion in space and time.

A three dimensional space (with people and objects in static and in motion) is captured over time with a digital camera. The room and everything static is digitally removed and thus leaving only visual residues of that in motion during this time of capture. The residues of motion are abstracted further and projected into a second part of the exhibition space.

In the documentation the camera covered the bar- and lounge area of the event where a more or less constant flow of dynamic motion was taking place all through the event. The piece was shown in a part of the exhibition space not visible from the lounge area and it was back-projected onto paper mounted on glass, giving the projection a material presence.

Technical

A digital SLR camera is connected to a computer and set for automation to cover a scenery where visitors of the exhibition are passing through or otherwise in motion. The camera has a wide angle lens with smallest possible aperture and is set for exposure times of ~10-30 seconds. As a result of this, the images are optically very sharp and have a depth of field that covers the entire scene. Though, due to the long exposure times, there is a motion blur of whatever is not static objects in the scene.

The images are fed regularly to the computer where a two step process is done. In the first step the input images are filtered against an adaptive filter algorithm that removes all objects standing still including the scenery of the image thus leaving only the blurred residues of motion that has taken place during the time of exposure. In the second step the motion residues are fed into an abstraction algorithm that results in a live generative projection of a multitude of dimensional translations.

The generative is the output being projected into a part of the exhibition space separate from the one covered by the camera. There is no explanation present in the projected space but for the title of the piece.

Concepts

With the exception of theoretical constructions, few entities (if any) can be said to be present with dimensional properties without any temporal properties. A “cube” (as an idea) can be said to exist outside of time, but a cube (as an object) can not. Arguably this goes for ideas as well, but that is out of scope for this discussion.

For example, yesterday there was a cup on my table, but today it is in the sink. This is as much a limitation of object qualities of spacial presence as in temporal presence. An object can only have one location in temporal presence just as it can have one location in physical presence.

This means that an object has a presence in space during an amount time, meaning that an objects temporal location is as much in flux as its physical location. So, due to this similarity of presence or extension into time as in space, objects as we perceive them can then really be said to extend into four dimensions, where the temporal dimension is assumed qualities similar to those of spacial dimensions.

As for our senses and minds, we can but perceive this extension in the temporal dimension as locations in moments of time and understand them in sequence as movement. This, though, is but one convention of comprehending presence in space and time. Commonly we understand spacial properties as interactive but time as an uncontrollable flow during which the interaction with spacial properties takes place. It is but conventions of mental semantics that keeps this construction in place. Any interaction with spacial properties is as much an interaction with temporal properties.

To continue the example with the coffee cup, compare these three sentences:

Explained

The result is only the movement over time is the three dimensional space as seen by the two dimensional image sensor of the camera. Or, as it might be put, one dimensional transformation in three dimensional space captured on two dimensional surface.