Six Seconds-worth Of Motion

Hi. My name is Rowley. Back in the late 1980's, one of the things I enjoyed doing with my Mac Plus was capturing video images. I used a ComputerEyes video digitizer, plugged into the back of my VCR. ComputerEyes was a modest little video-digitizing device that took 6 seconds to capture a black and white image, scanning across it sideways. To capture a single video frame, it was necessary to first tape something, then freeze-frame it and capture it during playback. But it wasn't long before I discovered that the most interesting images happened when I hit the capture button while the TV picture was still moving. This would cause it to capture six seconds-worth of motion.

I started out doing this with the VCR, on material I had taped from TV. The Mac Plus was set up in my bedroom, connected via a long cable to the VCR in the living room. When something interesting came on TV, I would first tape it, then capture images from it during playback. But I got tired of reaching around the door into the living room with the remote, so I started just hitting the Capture button at random, just to see what would show up onscreen. I first did this on an old black & white Hitchcock movie late one night. I was still doing it when the local Sunday morning programming came on.

I filled many disks with these images. Most of them I saved as monochrome PICT files, using a standard MacPaint-style dithering. Occasionally, I would capture an image as a grayscale TIFF, though I could not display them on my Mac Plus' monochrome monitor. It wasn't until I printed one out that I discovered what a difference those 8 bits can make.

With home computers just beginning to be able to do fancy 24-bit color graphics, no one was interested in my coarse monochrome PICTs. So they just sat on disk... until I found out how to use Adobe Photoshop to turn those dithered monochrome images into grayscale ones.

I learned how to use a combination of filters and scaling to coax an illusion of gray tones from the coarse black and white computer images. They'd never pass for photography, but smoothed into gray tones, the dithering patterns are not so distracting.

But they aren't really supposed to look like photography. The images retain a hold on me; I kept them and drag them out to look at occasionally... and now, here they are out here on the Web.

There's something about these images that speaks to the way we see things.

And they certainly say something about what we DON'T see in the things we look at.

These are all intermediate stages of moving images... stages that are always there, impinging on our consciousness, whether we are aware of it or not. Whatever emotional impact they carry in these frozen time-slices is also carried in the transitory movement, however fleetingly.

The most interesting things happen to talking heads. Distorting the human countenance produces an emotional resonance in the viewer, in the same way that a cartoon of a face can convey emotional content even when it is not realistically rendered.

In these frozen slices of motion, some faces look sad; others look threatening or angry, etc.

Aside from the Photoshop processing of some of them from black & white into grayscale, I have not altered any of these images in any way.

Televangelists...

...musical performances...

...and talk shows all served as great subject matter.

Occasionally, a capture taken during a fade from one TV picture to another would produce an image without any recognizable subject matter. One such image became the basis for a series of Photoshop drawings that I call The Megalopolis Variations.

Though the first such image is shown here just as it came from the tube, it was inevitable that I would want to manipulate these images. Most of the manipulations are simple collage... selecting an area and pasting in parts of another image.

They seem to be composed of shadows cast against a wall; circuit boards; and atmospheric events, all centering around a bridge or some other monumental structure, dwarfed by distance.

They play tricks on your sense of perspective and scale, almost like a tree planted in bonsai.

It wasn't until much later that I realized that these warped and frozen segments of motion were a direct continuation, after a hiatus of more than 20 years, of photographs I had taken in college that sampled motion over long exposures in low-light situations, using slow black and white film.