I will elaborate on the bridge between my projects; how my hopes and plans for new artwork draw upon my the substance of my previous work. But not in this post. In the next one. Before I create that post, I must introduce and outline the direction of my new research and what artistic potentialities I have been imagining.
Last March, while on Spring break in Tokyo with my girlfriend and another friend, I woke up in the middle of a night bus to Kanazawa. Electric snakes of streetlight had got into the cabin around the edges of closed curtains and were scanning the dark stock of sleeping passengers in a violent, bright barcode. The face of my girlfriend asleep in the seat beside me had become an astoundingly incoherent, fascinating and disturbingly inhuman playground of cubist shards. I stared for a long time, in a sustained strain to see her beneath the flickering projections of the huge highway zoetrope we were shuttling along in, as though on some cosmic voyage.
The circumstance of my inspiration is vaguely reminiscent of an experience that contributed to Brion Gysin's plans for the Dream Machine, a stroboscopic entrainment device.
"Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseilles.
We ran though a long avenue of trees and I close my eyes against the setting sun.
An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time.
I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees.
Was that a vision? What happened to me?"
-Extract from the diary of Brion Gysin 21/12/1958
I'd made my own dream machine several summers before. However, it failed to lead me into a hypnagogic state in my first several sessions with it, so I gave up on it, somewhat disappointed. Had I made an error in the calculations of it's construction? Was I not being receptive to the machine? Was brainwave synchronization pseudo-scientific bullshit? Not knowing what was to blame, I suspended judgment of the whole affair.
Back on the night bus, I closed my eyes and considered my impulse to film what I'd witnessed at some point, perhaps setting it as the opening to a feature film. I thought of the unsupported frame rates on the Panasonic AG HVX200 that could be reached with a hack and I wondered how fast the bus was moving, how far the streetlights were apart and what angle the beam was allowed to sweep through the cracks in the curtains.
Why is there no capability to alter frame rate on the fly with digital cameras? Was hand-crank technology my recourse? I wanted to know what the scene might look like plunged down to 1 fps, then ramped back up past 24 Hz. I wondered what interference patterns would appear when the frame rate was dissonant with the rate of the lights flickering over my girlfriend's face and I wondered if I could discern her as whole again if the two rates were harmonic. It struck me that varying the speed of the bus and the frame capture rate of the camera would be a song for two voices written against the still tapestry of life.
This was a leap of inspiration in a solution precipitated from a long period of mental fog. Earlier, I had discussed with a friend the idea of different characters/objects in a scene being displayed at different frame rates. This was the case in a 2D space video game he'd been working on and we imagined the potential of the idea as a subtler form of leitmotif (such as heralds all appearances of Darth Vader). Full scenes could be shot this way as well, contributing to mise en scène in a similar manner as a film's color palette.
But, as with color, what semantic and emotional range might different frame rates correspond to? An explicit answer to this question was something mysterious to me for a while, though I had some rough intuitions born from visions and scenes in my dreams. While educating myself with a Wikipedia article on binaural beats, I came across a table that paired the frequency of brain waves with usual associations for each dominant state:
> 40 Hz
Gamma waves
Higher mental activity, including perception, problem solving, fear, and consciousness
13–40 Hz
Beta waves
Active, busy or anxious thinking and active concentration
7–13 Hz
Alpha waves
Relaxation (while awake)
4–7 Hz
Theta waves
Dreams, deep meditation
< 4 Hz
Delta waves
Deep dreamless sleep
Age is proposed as another correlated variable. I imagined a film of children playing in theta range fps with fast energy and the erratic quantum movement of little electrons. However, the true effect of this proposed contribution to cinematic language is something that needs to be born out in experimentation and practice, not mere hypothesis.
Can a model of sampling rate be applied to human perception itself, and if so, would brain wave frequency be an accurate way to quantify the range of different modes we perceive in? This is a subject I plan to read much more about. Unfortunately, there appears to be a paucity of literature on this topic that is of a rigorously scientific nature. However, this impression is only from my initial survey of a small pool of resources so far, so I'm hardly discouraged.
One of my hypotheses is that the cinema standard of a fixed 24 fps (up from 16 and 18 in the silent era), although a product of myriad historical determinants, including economics and projection mechanics, happens to be a rate near the brain wave frequency of an average person engaged in viewing film.
This observation begs the question of whether cinema can successfully be injected with elements of photic/visual driving (This is one name for a process of entrainment whereby a stimulus can induce trance by locking onto and leading a viewer's brain waves in one direction or the other). Thus my ambition is not only to explore whether I can subtly strengthen the presentation of images and narrative by strategic variation of frame rate-- I believe that this contribution to cinematic technique may be powerful enough to transport viewers to specific states of perception in tune with given scenes.
Motivated manipulation of frame rate is the direction in my research and experimentation I'm most excited to explore. However, it is neither the first nor most recent field of my attention in research-art. Frame rate is the second of three.
The first: It was about two years ago that I saw an experimental film which became the paragon for my endeavors. The film was made by my girlfriend (though that's a detail subordinate to the fact that it was all a dream I had, so not really). It basically depicted the birth and death of a snowflake; I'll suffice to say that the innovative beauty of the film was in the complex way it treated depth and time.
Film compositors treat effects and video as a “stack” of 2D layers. Though this is typically toward the end of merging multiple layers into a one seamless channel, it is a design principle that can also be exploited in a way that ruptures the illusive spatial depth of live-action video.
Imagine a particular channel being used as a character itself in a larger work: The silhouette of a human could define the boundaries of a layer, the content of which could convey more information as a window into the character's psychological state than as a solid human body. The shadow of a building, a flock of birds and a puddle of water could all be screens. To make a dense collage from many video-layer objects strikes me as a much more elegant and potent tool for multi-channel display than either split screen or multi-panel installations.
I suspect that the majority of research necessary for advancement in this field has to do with developing sophisticated algorithms for boundary detection, both within a frame and over time (so as to minimize the disadvantages of blue/green screen). Yet, the basic architecture of video compositors is built for this technique, so I'm optimistic about experiments in this direction.
Third: The application toward film of the high dynamic range imaging techniques employed in specialist photography. This interest stems purely from my frustration with the small dynamic range and consequent lighting problems of cameras, digital in particular.
I'll paraphrase Stan Brakhage to say that there is no such thing as a wrong exposure value. Right now I have an interest setting up high contrast scenes and changing camera exposure on the fly to reveal the bias of the lens. But ultimately, some knowledge of the human eye and a comparison of it to pixel arrays leaves me disappointed in the man made one.
