Social Metronome

From Rhizome Artbase
2005
Description

Social Metronome
Often digital imaging technology's development towards crisper images and brighter colors is seen as positive and inevitable. My recent work deconstructs these tendencies. I take as point of departure that this development is not a natural evolution but a convoluted series of choices, based on social, political, economical, and scientific concepts that are often perceived as inevitable. In these recent projects I am attempting to reconstruct the concepts of the camera and acknowledge and magnify the collaborative roll the camera and the computer play in the creation of digital imagery.
The social metronome is a project that deconstructs the image created by an optical and digital device, namely the camcorder. The footage is created by the computer application in conjunction with the camera and shows images that are created by movement. In these images people (also birds, cats, cars, and bikes) are barely individually recognizable but instead become figures constructed by their individual movement pattern. This way of observation is not a 'natural' inclination of the camera. (This natural inclination being a focus on form and a clear distinction of foreground and background, an optical image.) But is a reconstruction of this vision through the logical propositions of programming language in conjunction with the optical vision of a camera. In the series of quick-times on this website, the web-cam was set up from dawn to dusk, on a balcony facing a back-ally in Vancouver.

jacky Sawatzky
4 December 2005
Metadata
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outside link
2005
jacky Sawatzky