#time-based art

Gabriel de la Mora. Tabasco 82 II, 2015.

Each of these orchids is a work of art.

There are more than 100 stunning blooms featured at the 2017 Orchid Exhibition by Smithsonian Gardens and the United States Botanic Garden. This is the first time the annual show is at our @hirshhorn museum, where orchids act as colorful, time-based installations that constantly change over the course of the exhibition.

Thomas Wilfred. Nocturne, Op. 148, 1958

To start off the creation of my time based video, to copy Ian Breakwell’s style I looked for free to use piano pieces. This will serve as the background music to my time based piece, similar to what Breakwell did in “The Other Side.” With some research I was able to find some free to use work by Chopin at http://www.orangefreesounds.com/chopin-nocturne-op-9-no-2/. The elegance of it with the slow descent into chaos and calm is the vibe I wanted for my Time based Piece.  

To start off I recorded several 15 minute long shots of the sunset and sunrise on two different days out the view of my window. This is because due to the Coronavirus lockdown we are currently facing, I am not able to go out and record the theme I wanted in this project, which was a sea theme. 

Opening Adobe Premiere, I then loaded all my files including the sound files into the media viewer. This allows me to drag and drop and files I want into the timeline of the interface to start creating my video.

I started by dragging my 3 sunset videos onto the timeline, as well as the music I will be using. Knowing the length of my music will allow me to adjust the videos to the length of it accordingly. I then dragged my three sunrise video onto a different channel of the timeline. To mute any sound the videos had, I went to the music channels in the timeline and selected “M” which mutes the videos.

With both videos in the timeline I selected each set of videos and created a “nest”. This allows me to edit the video parts as one group rather than stretch each individual file in the timeline.

With the two parts of my video batched together, I started by slowing them both down to the length of the music, which is 4 minutes, 37 second and 0.2ms, I found this out by hovering my mouse over the file. By right clicking I selected “Speed/Duration” and set both videos to play for that duration. 

I now have to make the videos side by side. To do this I have to transform them. I clicked on the first video file and went to “Edit Controls” in the top left corner. Under this it will give me a bunch of parameters. To edit this I clicked on one which allowed me to transform the video in the video viewer. I then did the same to my other clip. 

With that, my video is done and I could render the final product. I selected the AVI file which is a valid format type for most modern websites. I rendered the file in 720p at 60ps. This took me about 40 minutes to finish rendering.

The finished video is available to view here:

https://streamable.com/6kgdzt

While the video I had in mind is not what I had in mind or not what I wanted to create, I did my best for what situation we are currently in and the constraints we had such as not being able to leave the house. I feel that without those constraints I could’ve created something better. 

I chose the view of the sunrise and sunset as my theme of focus because like Ian Breakwell’s piece I wanted two videos that contradicted each-other, and I think that while looking the same, the sunrise and sunset contradict each-other perfectly. The videos were recorded outside the window of my bedroom at around 19:30pm until 20:00pm, and around 6:00am to 6:30am.

For this part of the project I will be looking at two different artists who 

Douglas Gordon, born September 20th 1966, is a Scottish born artist known for his works in time-based art. He came into fame in 1996 winning the Turner Contemporary Prize and then later won the Premio 2000 in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998.

Not much is known about his home life, but in his younger years at the age of 10 he was encouraged by teachers act on his artistic tendencies at the first opportunity. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. 

He work is seen as commentary on memory, with repetition as a common theme among these, and often uses media created by film-makers and his own performances. His installations usually use multiple monitors. One of his most famous pieces include “24 Hour Psycho”, the original movie “Psycho” by Alfred Hitchcock slowed down to 24 hours in length.  It was slowed down by extending the frames to play at one per two seconds. 

His “left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right” shows two projections of “Whirlpool” by Otto Preminger next to each other, with the one on the right reversed so that they mirror each other, the frames oppose each other, with one screen playing forward only on even-numbered frames, and the other being played backwards 

“24 Hour Psycho” by Douglas Gordon

For this piece I may consider using public available media to create my time-based piece similar to Gordon. While I won't be able to use two monitors to emulate his presentation in the same way, I can still use his ideas of repetition and memory and incorporate it into my work. I like the strong meanings behind his work, especially to do with perception of the viewer, it is completely subject to how the viewer interprets the piece. 

Another artist I am choosing to look at for this challenge is Ian Breakwell. Born May 26th 1943, Breakwell was a renowned British artist known for the exciting amount of mediums he chose to explore. He was born in Derby and studied at the Derby College of art. 

One of his pieces, “The Other Side”, is a double-video screen and sound installation, similar to the works of Gordon. It was commissioned as part of his accommodation at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. The film is shot on the upper landing, with the camera pointing out the window that overlooks towards the sea horizon. The film plays in two alternating sequences, with one showing an elderly couple waltzing around the balcony of the pavilion to the haunting and beautiful melody of Franz Schubert’s Nocturne in E-flat Major (Op.148), and the sound of waves and seagulls. On the other screen using the same sounds, a scenic view of vistas out towards the sea and horizon. No humans are to be seen in the scene, allowing the two screens to completely contradict and contrast each other; one is full of life and movement and the other full of nothingness. The two scenes are then switched between and reversed as the music ends, with the scenes slowly getting closer to the sun setting. The videos then plunge into darkness, with the music ending one last time and the scenes fading into the ambience of waves crashing and seagulls squawking, being left with nothing but a deadly silence. From this point on the scenes will repeat and start again. 

For me, this is my favourite out the two time pieces. To me it shows two different natures of human life, like fun and love, as well as loneliness and emptiness. While it goes on for too long for what I would like to make personally, I believe I could use it as a guide for what I would like to create. 

Assessment 2 Research: Daniel Crooks, Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement), 2010

Working across digital video, photography and now sculpture, [Crook’s] practice explores the elasticity of movement in time and space. Best known for his 'time slice' video technique – slicing ribbons of varying thicknesses into a video stream to create a lyrical displacement of time and space – Daniel Crooks has now extended these exploration into the real world through three dimensional sculptural works.

via