“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare
Cognition is a short film which tackles the dilemma of knowing versus not knowing. Set in the year 2030, a new technology is invented to project the next ten years of the lives of whoever chooses to interact with it. The film portrays a woman who chooses to interact with the technology and follows through the next ten years of her life as a result of viewing the screen. This sets the question of whether it was worth having such knowledge from the start or not at all.
David Claerbout is a photographer and a video artist, most widely known for his creation of moving images. It seems that a lot of his works include the element on time, where he conducts experiments on different time-based techniques to create his moving images. Unfortunately, many of Claerbout’s works are only displayed in the form of photographs, and his video art pieces, if available online are only displayed in short snippets.
“Antwerp-based artist David Claerbout’s video and digital photography projects intervene in our sense of linear time by slowing down, speeding up or even stopping time in filmic narratives. In his first solo exhibition in Canada, currently on view at Vancouver’s Belkin Art Gallery, a selection of Claerbout’s video installations from 1996 onwards mine our slippery relationship to duration. Presenting mysterious and compellingly incomplete storylines—such as a female figure emerging from a home, turning towards the camera and waving goodbye to the viewer in slow motion in Long Goodbye—in ways that separate narrative time from viewing time, Claerbout’s actors and dialogue quickly become the backdrop for the real subject of his work: the shifts in light and movements in environment that mark the passing of both hours and eons.”
“The Long Goodbye” is a silent video piece created and showcased in 2007. It was a video study between time and movement, and it features a female protagonist who makes her way around the house and eventually waves goodbye to the camera. From this 1 minute clip, it was obvious that Claerbout was trying to defy time by capturing the woman waving in slow motion while the sun sets quickly.
“Shadow Piece” is a 31-minute one-take video that features strangers looking through a large glass door over a long period of time. It seemed that in this piece, Claerbout made use of a lengthy video to gather anticipation in the viewers, as if wanted to create and evoke certain emotions in them as they watch strangers attempt to make it through to the other side.
In Shadow Piece, what is at stake is the modern promise of a clean, orderly and brightly lit future. In a partially digitally composed film (which actually is black-and-white archival photograph) we see people trying to enter a modernist building in vain. Over the course of 31 minutes, the balance and cleanliness of the composition gradually degrades into feelings of failure. The impossibility of accessing the building functions as a metaphor for photography and video as a time machine into which the spectator is unable to enter, as well as the utopian modernist dream that was never fulfilled.
For homework, I attempted to create a stereoscopic GIF out of multiple burst photos of my friend. I attempted this through Photoshop where I overlapped the photos over each other and created a sort of a “photo montage” video.
Original photos
I took some burst shots of my friend using the Sports mode on my camera. I made sure to pan the camera a little as I shot it so as to create some form of movement.
Edited photos
I edited the photos in Lightroom and re-exported them as JPGs.
Photoshop Process
I then uploaded them onto Photoshop to create the GIF.
Timeline Settings
I played around with the timeline settings and found 0.1 seconds per frame to work the best .
Aligning the subject
To create the “3D effect”, I aligned my subject towards the center for each frame and cropped out the blank parts later.
Audience viewing the main projection
Audience interacting with the second projection
Cognition; projected in NTU ADM’s Lighting Studio
