Mar 04 25
The camera was fixed, as on a tripod or by some similar stabilizing device. The only mechanism of movement being a slow, banal, centralized zoom. The camera would lock in on some scene or object, getting ever closer to the center of its focus; the central objects becoming larger and larger until they were only an abstraction.
This “abstraction phase” was pleasing; due to a combination of the release of tension, from the mounting, overwhelming, but ultimately impenetrable, closeness of the objects, and from the way these eventual, massive, unindividuated fields vibrated. It was hard to tell if there was some sort of additional treatment at this stage; as there was a lot of optical shifting — like millions of tiny, dark, pixelated pinwheels were shifting about.
The images lingered in this visual purgatory for about thirty seconds and then would smoothly shift to the next zoom. That is, by a very clever and slow crossfading of “scenes” a new pulled back view would emerge and start its middle point approach — always seeming like it was obsessively trying to get at some inner core of a thing or aspect of an area, but continually relegated to exteriors.
The objects and scenes were diverse, and not obviously related — a particular shadow of a hedge surrounding a lighthouse, a single grain of salt on a hot pretzel in an empty darkened mall, a lone backlit shade-drawn window of a middling government style building, the intersecting fibers of a small curly cloud in the background of an elaborate Rococo tapestry, the fuzzy lower tip of a crescent moon on a cloudless night above a field with scattered cows, the fastidious movements of a small spider wrapping some other insect in the recesses above a busy toll booth.
Accompanying the entirety of the production was a low unbroken tone. It sounded like the layering of a group of amplified yawns heard at a significant distance, the sweet recurrent agitation of hundreds of tiny hanging brass bells — as if by light breezes and the tinkling of a small pebbly river reverberating under the vaulted architecture of a deep catacomb or cave.
This “abstraction phase” was pleasing; due to a combination of the release of tension, from the mounting, overwhelming, but ultimately impenetrable, closeness of the objects, and from the way these eventual, massive, unindividuated fields vibrated. It was hard to tell if there was some sort of additional treatment at this stage; as there was a lot of optical shifting — like millions of tiny, dark, pixelated pinwheels were shifting about.
The images lingered in this visual purgatory for about thirty seconds and then would smoothly shift to the next zoom. That is, by a very clever and slow crossfading of “scenes” a new pulled back view would emerge and start its middle point approach — always seeming like it was obsessively trying to get at some inner core of a thing or aspect of an area, but continually relegated to exteriors.
The objects and scenes were diverse, and not obviously related — a particular shadow of a hedge surrounding a lighthouse, a single grain of salt on a hot pretzel in an empty darkened mall, a lone backlit shade-drawn window of a middling government style building, the intersecting fibers of a small curly cloud in the background of an elaborate Rococo tapestry, the fuzzy lower tip of a crescent moon on a cloudless night above a field with scattered cows, the fastidious movements of a small spider wrapping some other insect in the recesses above a busy toll booth.
Accompanying the entirety of the production was a low unbroken tone. It sounded like the layering of a group of amplified yawns heard at a significant distance, the sweet recurrent agitation of hundreds of tiny hanging brass bells — as if by light breezes and the tinkling of a small pebbly river reverberating under the vaulted architecture of a deep catacomb or cave.