Research

Concept

Time Lenses is an installation and research apparatus of multiple displays and cameras carefully placed in a physical location to refract activity into a suite of rhythmically recomposed movements. The work is not a performance but the condition of performance: it conditions the potential experience of an interior space such that ordinary activity can acquire poetic, rhythmic (musical) charge.

Time Lenses has been exhibited in Embodied Encounters at UC Irvine (2016-2017), and as part of Machines à dessiner at Le Musée des arts et métiers Paris (2016).  Time Lenses is also designed to be used as a background apparatus to any activity that happens in the space.  Thus, other artist-investigators can perform research or performative actions inside or among these Lenses, treating them as part of the enlivened architecture of the space. We collaborate this way with other participants in movement-based research.

Time Lenses is an installation of multiple displays and cameras that are carefully placed in a physical location to refract activity into a suite of rhythmically recomposed movements. The work is not a performance but the condition of performance: it conditions an interior space such that ordinary activity can acquire poetic or rhythmic (musical) charge. Live video processing instruments will augment the space so that any activity, rehearsed or unrehearsed, quotidian or marked, will refract into a suite of projections, each revealing a different temporal or rhythmic aspect of the corporeal activity within the space. An activity in the space will appear on these life-size installations that act as temporal lenses or temporal mirrors.  As a set, these time lenses explode captured movements into constituent rhythms and display them “contrapuntally” on the image surfaces arrayed in the space.

Live video processing instruments installed into the rotunda of the Musée des arts et métiers Paris will augment the space so that any activity, rehearsed or unrehearsed, quotidian or marked, will refract into a suite of projections, each revealing a different temporal or rhythmic aspect of the corporeal activity in that rotunda.   One variant, “Il y a,” is built to use pre-recorded footage of activity from before the present time.  Thus, in place of live video, we can substitute archival film or re-enactments of bodies from the historical past implied by the devices and machines in the Musée des arts et métiers.   Ghost bodies and present bodies intertwine in the heterotemporal museum.

An activity in the space will appear on (some cases seen “through”) these life-size installations that act as temporal lenses or temporal mirrors that refract and diffract activity.  As a set, these time lenses explode corporeal activity into constituent rhythms and display them “contrapuntally” on the image surfaces arrayed in the space.

The suite of time-lenses filter through bands of speeds, delays, pasts, rhythms using realtime treatments of live video and spatialized sound.   The point is that one does not look at a Time Lens, one looks through it.   Also, a Time Lens does not  depict particular pre-recorded image.   It is not even a operator on the visual form (like a mirror), it is a filter on temporal patterns.   A simple example of a temporal filter would be one that lets pass only the parts of a scene that move in a prescribed band of velocities.   Each particular Time Lens can have a seemingly simple behavior.  The power of the installation comes from the massing of effects depending on location, orientation, and the temporal structure of temporal effects, which induces a rhythm out of contingent activity.  (Order out of chaos, to playfully reference Prigogine and Stengers.)

​Custom software processes live video in realtime.  Each effect results from a carefully designed sensitivity to temporal pattern: slow-down, speed-up, delay, timelapse, filter for rhythm, filter for speed, etc.

Past Events

Embodied Encounters
Oct 2016 – Jan 2017
Beall Art Center, Irvine
J. Stein, installation lead artist
T. Ingalls, video instruments
O. Suteu Khintirian, visual art
Sha X.W., concept
Thanks to Matt Briggs, Pete Weisman, School of Arts, Media + Engineering for production support.

Body of Knowledge
8-10 Dec 2016
UC Irvine
Sha X.W. Panel convener: Collective embodied experience

Les corps dessinant
Musée des arts et metiers
Paris
1 – 4 Dec 2016
Curated by Barbara Formis and EsPAS / CNRS France
J. Stein, installation lead
O. Suteu Khintirian, visual art
T. Ingalls, realtime video
​Sha X. W., concept
Thanks to CNAM and Synthesis for support.

Team

Todd Ingalls: Time Instruments | AME, Synthesis

Julian Stein: Responsive Media Artist | Synthesis

Sha Xin Wei: Director, Concept | Synthesis

Oana Khintarin: Visual Art

Ben Nandin: Responsive Media Artist | AME, Synthesis

Connor Rawls: Technical Team | Synthesis